It’s a big week for Facebook. Yesterday they announced the Friendfeed acquisition and today they’re upgrading their search capabilities.

When I teach personal branding on Facebook, I always warned people to make a note of important things when they see them – that the information will disappear into the stream as fast as it got there. Now that is no more. Facebook has improved search to cover all those great (and not-so-great) things in your stream.

According to their blog post,

You now will be able to search the last 30 days of your News Feed for status updates, photos, links, videos and notes being shared by your friends and the Facebook Pages of which you’re a fan. If people have chosen to make their content available to everyone, you also will be able to search for their status updates, links and notes, regardless of whether or not you are friends. Search results will continue to include people’s profiles as well as relevant Facebook Pages, groups and applications.

So now you can find that site someone shared with you and you were going to look at later. The search results filter things on the left-hand side, which is a familiar format for Facebook users. You can view results by friends, posts, applications, and more. You can even search the Web and Facebook will source the results from bing.

This definitely makes Facebook more useful for me – if only because I do put off acting on my friends’ suggestions and this makes things more searchable. Will I change my privacy settings to make my content available to everyone on Facebook? Probably not. I’ll stick to my friends in my walled garden and be perfectly content.

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Cheers!

Tweet Michelle @writetechnology, send her technology news at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, visit her wine blog when you’re thirsty, and drop by her day job.

Tagged as: facebook, real-time, search, stream