HIDE AND SEEK
It's been a month since Facebook announced that it's opening up it's 45 million strong user base to be crawled by search engines, as part of a "public listing service".
The results only yield the limited profile of a Facebook user, which typically only include their picture and name. GigaOm's Om Malik in a post back then posited that
"In a month from now, these public listings are going to be find their way into search engine indexes."
So I decided to see if searching for my name on Google would result in my Facebook listing on the first page, and sure enough it did. It was seventh down on the list, but still on the first page, which is not bad a few weeks after Facebook's announcement.
Next, I entered "Robert Scoble" into Google, given Robert's profile has a massive user of social network services like Facebook, Twitter, etc. He has 5000 friends (the limit) on Facebook alone.
Robert's Facebook listing didn't show up on the first page of Google Search results, or the second or third.
If one enters "Robert Scoble" and "Facebook" into Google, you do get his limited profile page on Facebook. But it's likely several pages down in the Google search results. Interestingly, Robert's Twitter page DID make it onto the first page of Google's search results.
Same results for "Jason Calacanis". No Facebook profile joy on Google's first search results page, but his Twitter page again, did make the cut.
Next, I tried the names of half a dozen friends of mine who have Facebook profiles, but DO NOT have an active online presence in the forms of blogs, social networks, etc.
In all of those cases, their Facebook profiles surprisingly DID NOT show up on the Google results, yet.
So a quick conclusion from this cursory, un-scientific test would be that for folks who are not active bloggers and/or voracious producers of UGC (user-generated content), the Facebook public listing service search service, is not as useful, given that their other online activities and published content would show up higher on Google search results.
But for the most of mainstream folks out there, Facebook's public listing may end up taking a little longer to become the new Internet white pages.
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