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.