The Facebook Blog

This month, we're rolling out Inbox search, a tool which allows you to search through all of your messages either by name of the person who sent it, or by a keyword that shows up in the text. Ever had a friend send you a Facebook message suggesting a good restaurant? Or maybe you were sent an address or phone number of an old friend. Then time passes and your Inbox fills up, and by the time you're ready to go out to eat with your old friend you have to page through hundreds of Facebook messages to find the one you need. Inbox Search aims to fix this problem.

Inbox search was something we knew we needed for a long time. It's been requested a lot by users, so we wanted to take the time to make sure we built the right solution that would scale to support everyone using the site. Millions of messages are sent everyday on Facebook; we built an in-house system to handle indexing all of this information for Inbox search. Once we developed this system, we began testing it for some users to make sure it was stable and ready to go. Starting this week, Inbox search is available to a few networks, but soon everyone will see a search box at the top of their Inbox enabling them to search through all past messages.



Prashant is a Facebook engineer.