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Facebook now saves all your searches to your private Activity Log

Facebook now saves all your searches to your private Activity Log

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Facebook today began rolling out a new feature that lets you see a history of everything you've searched for on the social network. A list of search queries now appears intermingled with all the Likes, comments, and wall posts that appear inside the Activity Log, a private section of your profile that only you can view. Only searches from now on get included in Activity Log, so you can't go back and revisit who you've been repeatedly stalking all these years.

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facebook activity log
facebook activity log

Facebook today began rolling out a new feature that lets you see a history of everything you've searched for on the social network. A list of search queries now appears intermingled with all the Likes, comments, and wall posts that appear inside the Activity Log — a private section of your profile that only you can view. Only searches from now on get included in the Activity Log, so you can't go back and revisit who you've been repeatedly stalking all these years. It works just like search and URL history inside your web browser.

Facebook_search_log

The default privacy setting for searches is "Only Me," and cannot be changed unlike the privacy toggles of other Activity Log entries. But, you can delete any searches you want to hide from yourself. The idea is to provide added context and transparency to using Facebook, as well as provide you with complete control over every single thing you do on the site, like searches — which apparently we're doing a lot of. Mark Zuckerberg recently spoke about how Facebook gets over a billion search queries per day.

Some people think that searching publicly can yield better answers, especially when tied in with Facebook's real-time News Ticker. The new Bing, for example, can be set to publicize your search queries inside a Bing sidebar so friends can help if they have knowledge about what you're searching for. You can also manually share any Bing searches you've performed to Facebook so friends can comment on them. The Facebook update will roll out over the next few weeks, the company said.