Facebook Provides new ‘Quick Access’ Hyperlinks for Your Most Considered Pages and Profiles

Do you have any social media profiles that you check regularly out of sheer malice?

You know them – that guy you used to be with who is now tweeting radical conspiracy theories, that ex-schoolteacher you really didn’t like, former employers or co-workers who you don’t necessarily wish well to.

Everyone has one or two, and now Facebook is making it a little easier to check in with them with this new feature Quick Access Tabs in search highlighting your most frequently searched profiles, pages and features in the app.

As you can see in this example posted by Radu Onescu (and shared by Matt Navarre) Facebook started testing the new Quick Access tabs over the weekend that appear above your Recent Searches in the search box at the top.

Which is of course not a huge time saver, as you can easily search for anything you want to find using keywords in the query box, while also tapping on your recent searches to query the same again. But it just makes it a little easier to quickly get to the profiles you keep checking in – these are most likely people and / or pages that you don’t follow as their posts would already appear in your main feed.

That means you’re likely looking for them for reasons other than just keeping up with friends. More specifically, this could also help make Facebook stalking easier by keeping those quick access points at the top of the screen in the most prominent position in search, so you can keep an eye on people outside of your connections.

Of course, Facebook has various data protection tools that enable users to protect themselves from them. But I’m still not sure I see any major use case for these new tabs other than regularly poking around the profiles of people and sites you don’t follow, which seems a little strange.

It’s a relatively minor addition in either case that doesn’t seem to add a bunch to the process. And as highlighted in the example above, it could also help users quickly access Facebook features on top of their most frequently searched profiles, while it could also help users keep in touch with pages they want to follow and them too keep top of mind, with a logo for branding.

It probably won’t have much of an impact on user behavior, but it can help users keep track of important elements and possibly pages as well.

The new test is available to some Facebook users, but nothing is known about a broader roll-out at the moment.