If you're on Facebook, and you'd like to find someone you're not friends with, here's how you can do it.
First, in order to see the full results of your search, you'll need to sign up for Facebook. If you're already a member, go ahead and login.
- Go to the find your friends on Facebook page. You have a number of options here: find people you know by email, find people you know by last name, find people on your IM (instant messenger) list, browse for people alphabetically (this is somewhat tedious) or browse Facebook pages by name.
- Use your Facebook friends as a resource. Click on their Friends and choose the "See All" option to scroll through their list of friends. This is a great way to find someone in common that you might have forgotten about.
- Use the Facebook Suggestions link (found to the right of your news stream) as a jumping off point. You'll not only see potential friends and fan pages here, but if you scroll down a little, you'll also see an opportunity to search within your groups: college, high school, workplace, camps, etc.
How do you like to search for people on Facebook? Give us your tips in the comments below.
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Thanks Wendy. But when searching for friends in “Find your Friends” page, I get a lot of results matched with the search words. They are from various countries but I would like to search the person within my country. Suppose I would like to search all people called “Wendy” only within United States. I will get a refine search option. But it’s very deep. I can only search for people only for particular city there, not the whole country. That means I cannot filter the search with “United States” but I can filter it “Naples, FL, US”. But I want to search within a huge range so that I do not need to search there again with “orlando, FL, US”, “Sunrise, FL, US” etc. I just want to search with “US” or “FL, US”. But filtering with this does not bring the people that comes with the specific city filtering. What’s the solution.
same problem. why is it so hard? it says region, but as you saif it wants exact city.
Hey guys, I have the same issue, hopefully Facebook is fixing these problems! Try your search again and let me know what happens.
To further add to what’s already been stated, if you do choose to go through the tedious process of going through your search alphabeticaly, page by page, you’re confronted by repeated profiles and some profiles don’t even match your keyword. I have always disliked facebook. I don’t see why the whole world is going stupid over it.
I totally agree with Mauro. I did a google search for this and found this page full of comments about the exact issue. The guy is a billionaire and I really don’t see what is so great about facebook. Do they even know about this problem? You would think it is one of the first things they would fix. Do they even try to use their own site?
I’ve wasted hours on facebook just trying to do a simple thing and have almost given up on it. Hopefully it will become less popular once the fad wears off. I can’t understand this modern world, they jump onto things like this and yet we can’t even work out how to use it. Social networking has been around for years and everyone treats this like its the latest technology. If you can’t do a simple thing like ’search for friends in your own country on facebook’ then why is it so popular??? Beats me.
It seems FaceBook is always changing sh!t. Sometimes for the better, but for the most part, they make it worse…
So just how do you find someone who has their last maiden name change due to marriage. You can put in their maiden name but who knows where that will take you.
yeah, isn’t the worlds most popular site awful. tools.
Your instructions are great, only why tell people how to do what is easily found, if I wanted that information I could just click on a page, I want to know how to find someone who is not showing as a friend, who is not in any of those ridiculous listings (since don’t even use them) find someone from my past that did not go to school with me, did not work with me, did not play in the same places.. so how the heck do you find those people anymore. Have a friend who did some changes for his site and gave us a different name to go by… how the heck can you search that one? So far the only thing I can tell is Facebook decided that we really can’t search for people anymore since they think they know who should be based on a lot of junk- and my favorite is you can not even contact them anymore. guess they think they are far too important to help us find our way with all their stupid changes (sorry, been bothering me for ages) hell I can’t even search for my own nieces second account because of this stupidity!!!!!!!!!!!!
elog.com has a special mode for searching facebook – pretty nice. Just select Facebook in the little dropdown thingy next to the search box.
I hate trying to find people on Facebook. MySpace was much easier, but everyone left there almost at once. Need a new social site that’s a mixture of the two.
Terrible, pointless article – how on earth do you search someone on FB?
FACEBOOK IT IS SUCKS!!
You cant search people,profile setings are very hard and so on.I do not understand why it is so great.
I want to be able to search by country and by city and i want to choose the age of my friend and choose the gender, I’ve always hated Facebook, other people will see the light one day and hate it too.
so true about facebook search sucking! why make it difficult to find someone who you no longer have any real tie to? I want to search just minneapolis for an old friend and I cannot find a way. This needs to be fixed, and is one of the reasons I rarely ever go on this site. I hope they are listening. and people start leaving this ever more convoluted sight. maybe then they will figure it out
exactly facebook is so lame. so slow. so tedious. so unorganized. total waste of time. and they just opened more offices. what do they do all day?
What is all this about
THANK YOU!!! Finally I realize I am not alone, after trying without luck to figure out how to search for people on Facebook and being baffled by the impossibility, and wondering why on Earth this site is so popular. Not to mention, up until I found this page, I thought I was the only one who even wanted a logical search feature. Myspace search was logical and worked – I could just search, for example, for “John Smith” in “Virginia” or even “John Smith” within a X-mile radius of whatever location. I cannot stand Facebook because of this.
One key issue is privacy. Imagine if people could search for someone based on where they live. With just a first name, a picture and a location someone (an online predator) could easily track you down