Graph Search is powerful enough to find anyone on Facebook. It’s a modern approach to Facebook’s previous search feature with a cool search box that suggests you perfectly to filter your searching.

I don’t want to drag you into the beauty and aesthetics of Graph Search, if you’re still willing to know more, read it here. Now coming straight on to the topic – the old Facebook search is not dead yet, and in this post I will show you how to use it back again.

Why?

“What’s good in using this again?” Well, I don’t have a proper answer to this question, as the Graph search has it’s own usage benefits. I use the oldie sometimes because I like to search Facebook in a more compact manner – to scan searches fast. See the image below to compare the two, the old and the new search:

Facebook Search: Graph vs. Old
Facebook Search: Graph vs. Old

Noticed those big thumbnails in the new search? They’re making it difficult to find things quickly, but at the same time, they make it clear to look at things one-by-one.

On the other hand, the traditional retired search displays it in a rather compact way, and to me, its what I want to use to scan the search results fast.

I don’t actually know if this will be helpful or not, as to me too, it is little helpful as I don’t explore Facebook that much. In hope that it’ll help others someway, here is how to get to use it again.

The Hack

You don’t need to install any plugins, apps or browser add-ons to do that. There is nothing to revert to it, as Facebook has not removed the feature completely, and will itself help you to search things in that classic, old way. Look at the below given URL:

https://www.facebook.com/search/results.php?q=techably

The above is the old search URL that shows up the searches as shown below, provided you change the term in red to your search query:

The Old Facebook Search
This link will get you to something similar to above

Using the side pane (as you can see in the screenshot), you can filter search results for pages, people, places, groups etc.

In order to search something like Rahul Arora, you’ll need to modify the URL a bit by adding a ‘+’ for the spaces:

https://www.facebook.com/search/results.php?q=rahul+arora

A few days ago, I was able to access it’s important features like Posts by friends, Public posts. As of now, these two things are gone from the left side pane. I guess it’s Facebook security team who is patching up the privacy loops.

And that wraps it up. Let me know if you found this helpful, drop me a comment below or at TechAbly fan page.