Facebook starts making profiles visible in search, removes option to opt-out

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Facebook has started the process of making all user profiles visible in search results throughout the website in order to improve the networking and Graph Search based discovery for end users.

Facebook has announced through its blog that users will no longer be able to opt out of the site's global search listing and profiles will be publicly visible to everyone.

In a lengthy post, Facebook has outlined that many of its users faced issues while finding people whom they knew personally but had disabled search listing which led to a broken search experience. Users are advised to control what they post and set up post visibility in order to maintain privacy once these changes are completely rolled out globally. The "Who can look up your Timeline by name?" feature will be removed as a result of which any user can be searched for using Facebook's search bar. The post also mentions that the advanced Graph Search, which was rolled out for everyone in July gives detailed results to users making post visibility settings more important to users rather than search visibility.

Facebook has stated that a small percentage of users actually used the "Who can look up your Timeline by name?" feature. These users will see the following notification on top of their News Feed when Facebook removes the setting from their profile.

Facebook is known to make changes to the UX every now and then and such a move does not come as a surprise from the company which relies on revenues from advertisements.

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