Facebook finally brings Graph Search to mobile, also lets you search feed posts by keywords

Nearly two years after introducing “Graph Search” on web, Facebook is finally bringing the functionality to its mobile platform with improved features, wrote Tom Stocky, vice president of search at Facebook, in a blog post. Facebook says over the next week, it will be bringing the Graph Search technology to its iPhone app. Furthermore, the company is also making it possible for one to search for status updates, links, videos and other content that have been shared with them.

Once the update has been rolled out, users will be able to look for contextual information in their friends’ posts and activities. “With a quick search, you can get back to a fun video from your graduation, a news article you’ve been meaning to read, or photos from your friend’s wedding last summer,” Stocky said.

Introduced in March 2013, Facebook Graph Search is a semantic search engine which is designed to understand what users are asking for in their natural language and provide them with relevant results instead of throwing web links at them. It utilizes information fielded by users themselves as well as Microsoft’s search engine Bing.

Search has become a crucial area of technology for most companies. Google has been constantly trying to improve search by adding more contextual information while weeding out spam and pirated links from its results, Twitter and Instagram have also made several search improvements over the past few months. Pinterest too has expanded its search tools in the past year.

Facebook would want to make the Graph Search more comprehensive while simplifying the service for most users. The Graph Search isn’t always accurate and often fails to understand the natural language. That said, the company isn’t shying away from moving forward though. It says that it intended to bring these features to the mobile app sooner, but delayed it because it wanted to learn how people were using the service and improve the ranking algorithm.

The Graph Search feature will become available on iOS sometime this week. The company is yet to announce a timeframe for an Android launch.

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