Ask your circle a question

Ask in the same place you search

1. Choose Ask for your circle on your home page.
2. Type your question in the writing box the way you'd say it out loud — "what goes in the apple pie?"
3. Choose the Search pill in the box.

When suggestions appear under Try, choose a chip to fill the box with its question and search straight away. You can also write your own.

A question gets an answer, and anything else is a search. Start with who, what, when, where, which, or how, or include a question mark, and we'll treat it as a question. The writing box also asks when you type a family word (like "Mom" or "my kids") or a person's or pet's name, or when you start with "show me", "find", "photos of", "pictures of", or "videos of"; other plain words stay a search. Your question needs at least one letter: a question mark on its own doesn't ask anything.

Other words find the posts and comments that contain them, even when the phrase is long. To ask with a different first word, add a question mark.

An answer appears above the ordinary search results. Those results remain available if no answer can be found or you need to wait before asking again. There is no conversation history or separate chat window.

Searching with keywords

Search looks through published post titles, captions, and circle comments. Put a phrase in quotation marks to look for those words together.

Results appear newest first. Open a result to read its post, chapter, or summary conversation. Choose Load more results to keep going. Before any matches appear the same button reads Search more, because a page can have no matches and still have more to search.

Search stays inside the circle you're viewing. It respects the circle's available history window and your personal hides. Pending posts, unavailable content, and conversations that belong to a sharing album aren't included. A paused circle remains searchable while you are a member.

Ask about one person

From a person's page in your circle, tap Ask about and their name to ask a question about just that person. The Ask page shows About and their name below the writing box, and the answer then comes only from the posts about them that you can see — the same posts listed on their page — and from what's been added to their page, like a born date. If none of them answers your question, we'll tell you. Remove that label to ask the whole circle again.

Where the answer comes from

The answer is put together from original posts and comments you can read in this circle. Under Where this came from, each numbered source matches the number in the answer. Choose Open post where a post link is available. A conversation source without a single post is labelled that way instead of linking to an unrelated post.

Counts, dates, and ages are worked out from your circle's posts and from people's pages; Ask about counts, dates, and ages explains how to check them.

Read the posts an answer points to, to check it. Editing the search text or changing circles clears the old answer. Choose Clear to empty the search and return to its input.

If nothing in your circle answers your question, we'll say so. We'd rather tell you we don't know than guess.

What stays private

• We never answer from another circle, even one you're also in.
• We never answer from a post you've hidden.
• An answer is put together for you and shown only to you. Keeping the posts behind it makes a collection your circle can see; it doesn't save the answer itself. The answer is never shown as though a member had written it.

Keeping the posts behind an answer

Where this feature is available, any circle member can keep the posts behind an answer together as a named collection. The collection keeps the question and links to the original posts, not a copy of the answer. Other members see only posts they are allowed to read.

Opening a kept collection can add matching posts from your circle. It does not write a new answer or use another question from the daily allowance. There is no scheduled refresh or expiry. Posts a member removes from the collection stay excluded, and posts a member adds are not removed by this refresh.

The member who kept the collection or the circle owner can rename or remove it. Other members can still add or remove individual posts from the collection. If the person who kept it leaves, the circle owner can still manage it.

A few things to expect

• Questions about what's genuinely in your circle work best — a recipe, a date, what someone said about a photograph.
• You can ask about people the way you'd talk about them, like "where are the photos of my mom?", and we match them to the people and relationships in this circle.
• An answer that needs two posts will show you both.
• If you ask several questions in a row, we'll ask you to slow down for a moment. Wait ten seconds and try again.
• There's also a limit on how many questions one person can ask in an hour. If you reach it the wait is a little longer, and the ordinary search results remain available.
• Your circle shares a daily allowance of questions between everyone in it. If it's been used up for the day, you'll be asked to wait even if you've only asked once — that isn't something you did, and it starts fresh the next day.

Need help?

If an answer looks wrong, open the posts it points to and check — and let us know.