How to Search for a Specific Person on Facebook

By Carolyn Abram from Facebook For Dummies, 4th Edition

The Facebook Friend Finder is a great way to build your Friend List quickly without a lot of work. But how do you find a specific person who may want to be your friend if that person isn’t in your email Address Book or a coworker? Facebook Search offers you the capability to seek out certain friends by name.

The search box in the blue bar on top lets you search a whole lot of things on Facebook: Pages, groups, events, even questions. But most of the time, you use it to search for people. It may be people you are already friends with and you just want to go to their timeline. Sometimes it will be people you aren’t friends with yet that you want to reach out to.

Basic search can be a little confusing because Facebook auto-completes the names that you type and assumes you are trying to get to your friends’ timelines. If you’re the type of person who is used to pressing the Enter key to begin a search, this can lead you landing on friends’ timeline pages when you meant to search for someone else named James.

There are two basic ways you’ll wind up using search. The first is if the person you’re looking for (or at least, someone with their name) appears in the auto-complete menu. That sort of search can be accomplished following these steps:

Begin typing their name into the search box.

Pay attention to the people who appear in the auto-complete menu. Facebook displays first your friends and then friends of friends. There’s a good chance that you may find the person you’re looking for in this menu that appears.
If you see them in the auto-complete menu, use your mouse or arrow keys to highlight the person you are looking for.
Click their name or press Enter.

This brings you to their timeline, where you can verify that you know them and add them as a friend.

If you don’t see the person you’re looking for, don’t despair; you can get more results:

Type their full name into the search box.
Click the search icon (do not just press Enter) to begin the search.

This brings you to a full list of search results.
Click the particular person you are looking for to get to their timeline and add them as a friend.