How to Do an Advanced Search on Facebook

Want to easily find your former middle school crush or a cute post you saw weeks ago? Facebook's advanced search option makes finding people or posts quicker by helping you avoid having to sort through pages of irrelevant results. You can use Facebook advanced search to find posts from friends, posts in groups and more.

You may have a lot of difficulty in finding a nonfriend on Facebook with a very common name. That's because there can literally be dozens or hundreds of people on the social networking platform with the same name. It's typically much easier to find a person if you use Facebook advanced search. To use advanced search for people, type in the person's name in the top search bar and click the "Search" button. Click the "People" tab on top and then select the filters on the sidebar. You can filter your search results by selecting the "City," "Education," "Work" and "Mutual Friends" options. It's usually easiest to filter by "City" since not all Facebook users will list their education or work on their Facebook profile. Click "Choose a city" to filter by the city you think the person lives in and then press "Enter" to filter by city. If you think the person may be a friend of a friend, you can select the "Friends of Friends" option.

Facebook's advanced search option is also useful for finding posts that match certain criteria. You can even use it to find posts you previously saw on Facebook pages whose owners you can't remember. Use Facebook advanced search for posts by typing in words that match the post you want to search for and then click the "Search" button. Click the "Posts" tab on top and then select your filters on the left sidebar. You can filter by "Posts From," "Post Type," "Post Group," "Tagged Location" and "Date Posted." It's usually easiest to filter by "Posts From" and "Date Posted" if you remember the approximate post date or year. Click "Posts From" and select either "You," "Your Friends and Groups" or a different source and then press "Enter" to filter it. Do the same for "Date Posted" or any of the other filter types if you want those to apply.

If you're a member of a Facebook group, then you'll find the ability to do an advanced search especially helpful as it enables you to find just about any post in that group quickly. Searching the group page is a bit different from searching for posts or people. Go to the group page that you want to search through and click the "Discussion" tab. Type in the words for the post that you want to find in the "Search this group" search box and then hit the "Enter" key. The posts that are found will be displayed in order of popularity by default, so click the sidebar option "Most Recent" to display posts in their order of addition. You can further narrow the results by clicking on filters such as the "Date Posted" and "Posted By" options. Note that posts that have been deleted from your group will not be displayed.