Creeping through your friends' Facebook profiles may become a lot easier.
Facebook is testing a new feature that enables users to search within individual profiles.
The new search function shows up as a separate search box in the right-hand corner of their profile, allowing for you to search their page for specific words or phrases.
For example, if you were to search the word "birthday," all of the posts from your birthday would come up.
"We’re piloting a way to search for people’s posts from within their Profiles. You can only search for posts that you can already see on their Timelines," a Facebook spokesperson told Tech Insider.
While this seems like a small change, it can actually be hugely helpful. For example, say you see an interesting news article in your Newsfeed posted by a close friend. But when you go to their profile, it's no longer at the top of their feed. This will enable you to search a keyword from that post on their profile so that you can locate it again.
At least for now, though, the feature is only rolled out to some users and is only in English on desktop.
This is nothing out of the usual for Facebook — the company is notorious for testing new features on random sample groups. It's actually built into how the company develops and rolls out new features to its massive userbase. "Every day, we run hundreds of tests on Facebook, most of which are rolled out to a random sample of people to test their impact," Facebook's Andrew "Boz" Bosworth wrote back in 2012.
Alexander Kaufman, a business editor at The Huffington Post, was one of the first to report seeing the feature, according to Mashable, who first wrote about the feature. You can check out how to spot the new function in Kaufman's screenshot below.
—Alexander C. Kaufman (@AlexCKaufman) November 13, 2015
Facebook has been making a lot of moves lately to make searching its platform easier.
For example, last month, the company rolled out its Search FYI feature, which makes anything you ever posted publicly easily searchable.
New search capabilities aren't the only thing the company is apparently testing.
The company is currently letting people in France try out a Snapchat-like feature that lets messages disappear.
