Facebook’s advanced search feature allows you to craft more targeted searches to help you find specific people, pages, groups, events, photos and other content. Here’s what you need to know about using advanced search on Facebook.
What is Facebook Advanced Search?
Facebook’s advanced search gives you more options and filters to narrow down your search results. With advanced search, you can filter by things like location, workplace, school, relationship status, age range, keywords, posts, photos and more. This lets you search for very specific people, posts, photos and other content on Facebook.
For example, you could use advanced search to find Facebook friends who live in a certain city, or to find photos from a specific event or time period. It provides more precision than just doing a basic search on Facebook.
How to Access Advanced Search
There are a couple ways to access Facebook’s advanced search functionality:
- From the top search bar: Click on the downward arrow at the far right of the main Facebook search bar at the top of the screen. Select “Advanced Search” from the dropdown menu.
- From the shortcut link: Go to https://www.facebook.com/advanced_search/ directly.
Either of those options will bring you to the advanced search page where you can specify your filters.
Advanced Search Options
Facebook’s advanced search page provides several categories of filters you can use to narrow down your search:
People Filters
- Name: Search for people by their first or last name.
- Location: Search for people located in a certain city, state or country.
- Hometown: Find people whose hometown is a certain place.
- Current City: Search for people who currently live in a specific city.
- Workplace: Find people who work or have worked at a certain company, office or organization.
- School: Search for people who attended a certain school, college or university.
- Relationship: Find people with a certain relationship status (single, in a relationship, engaged, married, etc).
- Gender: Search for men, women or a custom setting.
- Age: Search within specific age ranges.
- Language: Find people who speak certain languages.
Page Filters
- Page name: Search for pages by their name.
- Location: Find pages located in or associated with a certain place.
- Category: Search within page categories like local business, company, community, public figure, etc.
Event Filters
- Event name: Search for events by their name.
- Location: Find events happening in a specific city, state or country.
- Hosted by: Search for events hosted by a specific person or page.
Group Filters
- Group name: Search for groups by name.
- Location: Find groups associated with a certain place.
Post Filters
- Keywords: Search for posts containing specific words or phrases.
- Posted by: Find posts created by a certain person or page.
- Date posted: Search for posts within a certain date range.
Photo Filters
- Keywords: Search for photos by words or phrases in their descriptions.
- Location: Find photos tagged with a specific place.
- Date posted: Search for photos posted within a certain date range.
- People: Find photos containing specific people (as tagged).
You can use one or any combination of these filters to craft a very customized search on Facebook. The more filters you specify, the more your results will be narrowed down.
Sample Advanced Facebook Searches
Here are a few examples of advanced searches you can try on Facebook:
- Friends from your hometown high school, class of 2010
- Pages about rock climbing with over 1000 likes
- Singles Meetup groups located in Chicago
- Photos from your Costa Rica vacation last summer
- Local garage sales happening this weekend within 10 miles
Play around with combining the different filters to tailor your search and get the results you want.
Tips for Effective Advanced Facebook Searching
Here are some tips to use Facebook’s advanced search effectively:
- Use quotation marks around multi-word names and phrases to search for exact matches.
- Try broadening your search if you get zero results back – remove filters to widen the scope.
- Narrow your search by adding more filters if you get too many irrelevant results.
- You can re-sort results once the search completes by clicking the different column headers.
- Not all filters can be combined. Facebook will show you invalid combinations.
- The keyword filters search post content, descriptions, titles and names.
Advanced Search vs Basic Search
Facebook’s basic search, accessed via the top search bar, is still useful for quick searches. Advanced search gives you more precision when you need to dig deeper.
Here are some key differences:
| Basic Search | Advanced Search |
|---|---|
| Searches across people, pages, groups, events & posts | Lets you filter to specific types like people or photos |
| Very broad searches | Narrow searches with many filters |
| Good for quick lookups by name | Better for targeted, specific searches |
In summary:
- Use basic search for quick, broad searches by name
- Use advanced search when you need to filter down to very specific criteria
Accessing Advanced Search on Mobile
You can also access advanced search on Facebook’s mobile apps for iOS and Android. Here’s how:
iOS App
- Tap the search bar at the top
- Tap the three horizontal line icon in the lower right
- Tap “Advanced Search”
Android App
- Tap the search bar at the top
- Tap the three vertical dot icon in the lower right
- Tap “Advanced Search”
This will bring up the advanced search page where you can enter and apply filters on your phone.
Conclusion
Facebook’s advanced search feature provides much more targeted search capabilities than basic search. You can craft searches using a wide range of filters to get very specific results.
Some key tips for mastering advanced Facebook search:
- Combine filters to narrow your scope
- Broaden your search if you get zero results
- Use quotation marks for exact phrase matching
- Learn which filters can and can’t be combined
With some practice, you can become a pro at leveraging advanced search to find exactly what you’re looking for on Facebook.