Facebook 'Find Wi-Fi' goes global

Photo illustration (REUTERS/Dado Ruvic).

Heads up, travelers: Facebook is rolling out a feature that should help you stay connected when you're on the go.

The feature, dubbed Find Wi-Fi, isn't technically new, but it will be new to most people. Facebook launched it in a handful of countries last year, and now the tool is going global. As its name suggests, Find Wi-Fi helps you locate available Wi-Fi hotspots nearby by displaying hotspots that businesses have shared with Facebook from their Page.

Facebook is now rolling out Find Wi-Fi everywhere on iPhone and Android. In a blog post, Facebook Engineering Director Alex Himel said users with access to the feature have found it helpful when traveling, and especially when they're in areas where cell data is scarce.

"Wherever you are, you can easily map the closest connections when your data connection is weak," Himel wrote.

To check it out, just open the Facebook app, click on the "More" tab and then select "Find Wi-Fi." Once you turn it on, you'll be able to browse the closest available hotspots on a map, and learn more about the businesses hosting them.

If you're traveling, you can make note of those places before you step out of your Airbnb, so you'll know exactly where to go to get Wi-Fi, instead of having to wander around a foreign city aimless and disconnected.

Meanwhile, Facebook also today announced a small tweak intended to reduce low-quality links you see in your News Feed.

"Our research shows that there is a tiny group of people on Facebook who routinely share vast amounts of public posts per day, effectively spamming people's feeds," the company's VP for News Feed Adam Mosseri wrote in a blog post. "The links they share tend to include low quality content such as clickbait, sensationalism, and misinformation."

Facebook will now deprioritize the links from these sources, so you're less like to see them when you visit the service.

The company also recently rolled out new policies, backed by artificial intelligence algorithms, that will sniff out and remove from News Feeds links to sites with annoying and misleading ads.

This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.