Facebook is the great social networking website that is used by almost 2 billion users. You can call it a people’s directory and you can easily find people on Facebook without logging in.The social giant daily gains thousands of new users.
Lots of people use Facebook to reconnect with friends and family. That's because Facebook is the largest and most popular social networking site on the web today. Millions of people check into Facebook daily, which makes it a fantastically powerful tool for finding people you might have lost contact with: friends, family, high school chums, military buddies, etc. These 8 methods can help you find the people you are looking for.
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Facebook Friends Page
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 the last name, find people on Messenger, browse for people alphabetically (this is somewhat tedious) or browse Facebook pages by name.
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Piggyback on Your Friends' Friends
Use your Facebook friends as a resource. Click on their Friends and scroll through their list of friends. This is a great way to find someone in common that you might have forgotten about.
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Search Facebook Profiles
Facebook has a page designated especially for the networks that people choose to belong to. On this search page, you can search by name, email, school name and graduation year, and company.
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Filter Your Facebook Results
Once you start typing something into the Facebook search bar, a feature called Facebook Typeahead kicks in, which returns the most relevant results from your immediate contacts. By default, when you search for someone on Facebook, you will get all the result on one page: people, pages, groups, events, networks, etc. You can filter these easily by using the search filters on the left-hand side of the search results page. Once you click on one of those filters, your search results will rearrange themselves into only results that coincide with that particular subject, making it easier for you to track down who you are looking for.
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Search For Two Things at Once
Facebook (unfortunately) does not have much in the way of advanced search, but you can search for two things at once by using the pipe character (you can make this character by pressing shift backslash). For example, you could look for baseball and Billy Smith with this search: 'baseball | Billy Smith.'
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Facebook Suggestions
Use the People You May Know link as a jumping off point. You will see potential friends and fan pages here.
By default, when you search for a topic on Facebook, the results you see will be from your list of contacts; your 'circle of friends', so to speak. If you would like to expand that circle to include results from anyone who has chosen to make their Facebook information publicly accessible, simply click on Posts By Everyone. This gives you the option to view information from people who are not included in your contact list.
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Find Classmates on Facebook
Search for former classmates on Facebook. You can either simply browse through a graduation year (this is a GREAT way to find people you have lost touch with), or you can type in a specific name to get more narrowed results. You'll also be given people from your alma mater if you include it in your own Facebook profile.
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Find Work colleagues on Facebook
If someone has ever been affiliated with a company (and has put this affiliation on their Facebook profile), you will be able to find it using the Facebook company search page.
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Search for Facebook Networks
This Facebook search page is especially helpful. Use the drop-down menu to search within your networks, or browse the left-hand side menu to filter your search results (recently updated, lists, possible connections, etc.).
Facebook's general search page searches ALL results; friends, groups, posts by friends, and web results (powered by Bing). You are given the option to 'like' pages and groups that you might be interested in here, as well as search for specific words within your friends' status updates.
So you want to look up or add someone on Facebook, but maybe doing it by searching for their name isn't an option. If you know their email address, you might be able to find their profile — but it's not guaranteed.
Why Look Someone Up on Facebook Using Their Email?
Here are three typical reasons why you might want to use someone's email address to find their Facebook profile:
- Their name is so common that it's too difficult to spot it among all the other Facebook users with the same name when you do a name search.
- They haven't listed their full name on their Facebook profile (perhaps using a nickname as a first name or a middle name as their last name).
- They (or you) don't know their Facebook username/URL so you can't use it to go directly to their profile.
Search for an Email Address in Facebook's Search Field
This will only work if the person you're looking for has their email address listed as public in their About info. Many people don't have this listed to maintain their privacy, so chances are more unlikely than likely that you'll find a person's profile this way. Still, there's no harm in at least trying.
- Navigate to Facebook.com in a web browser or open the app on your mobile device and if necessary, sign into your Facebook account.
- On the web, type (or copy and paste) the email address of the person you want to find into the Facebook search field at the top of any Facebook page and press the Enter or Return key.On the app, tap the magnifying glass at the top of the screen, enter the email address into the search field and tap Go/Search.
- By default, this search delivers results about anything related to your search — including pages, places, groups and more. Select the People tab to filter out everything except user profiles.Facebook will only show you profile results for people who have made their email or contact information public or who already have a connection to you.
- If you see a matching email address in the search results, select the person's name or profile photo to go to their Facebook profile.If you can't spot the correct profile in your results, you can try filtering the results if you know other information about this person. On the web, use the filters on the left side to filter by city, education, work or mutual friends. On the app, use the filter buttons in the horizontal menu at the top.
- Select Add Friend if you want to send them a friend request.
If you don't see this button, they might not all people to send them friend requests without a mutual friend connection. In this case, you might have to select Message to send them a message asking them to send you a friend request first.
Facebook used to allow you to sync your email contacts by uploading them from your email accounts. This feature appears to be discontinued.
Find People to Add on Facebook Messenger
Did you know that Messenger users don't even necessarily need to have Facebook account to use it? If you want to add people to Messenger, which you can do without adding them as friends on Facebook first, check out this article that walks you through five different ways to find and add people to Messenger.