Inside Facebook, February 24th, 2010
Google said it would be adding public updates from Facebook Pages, last December, and now the integration is live within its real-time search updates, the company says, although we’re not seeing anything yet. To be clear, as of now, only information provided by Page owners will appear. So shared links, status updates, multimedia, etc. but not users’ comments on Pages.
It’s not clear what volume of new material is going from Facebook to Google as a result, although Facebook’s self-reported numbers say that 3 million Pages are currently “active.” Out of that number, half are local businesses, 20 million people become Page fans each day, and more than 5.3 billion fans have been created (this means the total number of fans across all Pages, counting each fan separately for each Page). Given the size of Pages, we can assume Google is parsing billions of updates from the feature.
Google has been making a big push to include more information from other sites in its real-time results, with Facebook rivals Twitter and MySpace already appearing, along with many others. However, as Search Engine Land has confirmed, Facebook investor Microsoft is currently getting more for its Bing search engine: publicly available personal status updates from Facebook users. And yet, those don’t appear to be live yet.
Tags: Bing, Facebook, Facebook Pages, Google, Microsoft, MySpace, real-time search, Search Engine Land, Twitter