Facebook Opening Up Profiles to Search Engines

Facebook seems to be getting around to taking a play from MySpace.com's play book by opening up their user's profiles to search engines like Google.

Arguably, this isn't new news, since we wrote about it here back in May, but in reality, Facebook has less pages indexed by Google today than they did in May. Three months ago, Facebook had 276,000 pages indexed by Google compared to MySpace's 19,600,000. Three months later, Facebook has 102,000 indexed pages:

compared to MySpace's 23,700,000:

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that a site with 23 million pages in Google's index is going to get more free traffic from search than a site with one hundred thousand indexed pages.

As Om Malik explains it, Facebook's plan is to make public profiles of their 18+ year old users available to search engines. This will cause millions of Facebook pages to rank high in search results for personal names. Since so little comes up on searches for most individual's names, it seems likely that Facebook will begin to dominate search results for the names of their users almost overnight.

In fact, Facebook is better positioned to rank competitively for personal names than MySpace since Facebook users are MUCH more likely to use their first and last names in their profiles.

Is this a good thing? Yes, unless you don't want to be found. Of course, is that's the case you probably shouldn't be publishing content under your own name anywhere on the web.

Good points, especially about people using real first names and last names in Facebook. And your conclusion is right on, too. Don't associate your name on the web with anything you wouldn't want to be found.

I think this is really going to drive more adoption of Facebook by people who haven't been running into it previously. They'll start seeing it in their Google search results and will sign up for Facebook when they realize they can't send messages to the people they've found without joining.

I use Facebook quite frequently to keep in touch with friends. The one thing that appears to set them apart from MySpace is their privacy settings.

I have mine set so that unless you're my friend, you won't see my profile. And my friends on Facebook are people I actually know, in person, and have ongoing contact with.

Comments

1. Posted by: Gabe on September 5, 2007 3:53 PM:

The article you linked to mentions it briefly, but it might be worth pointing out that Facebook will be allowing users to decide whether or not their information is indexed by search engines.

The privacy functionality has already appeared in my facebook profile, and I can check or uncheck boxes (checked by default) for both "Allow anyone to see my public search listing" and "Allow my public search listing to be indexed by external search engines".

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