Facebook People Search Engine
Facebook today added public search listings meaning. if you agree, your name and profile picture will appear in organic search results when people look for your name.
A simple Google search for "inurl:www.facebook.com/p/" suggests that there are over 26.5k public profiles on Facebook already.
There's more - outsiders or non Facebook members can use the public search box on Facebook's home page to find friends who may have public profiles on Facebook and contact them.
Facebook vs LinkedIn:
Unlike LinkedIn public profiles which show quite a bit of information (example), public search listings on Facebook only include names and profile picture (example).
How Do Search Engines Discover Facebook Profiles ?
Normally search engines like Google or Yahoo! discover new web pages only when they are linked from another website that's already in the index of search engines.
Would anyone have a clue how Google would discover your Facebook public profile when it's not hyperlinked from any other site.
Related: Most Innovative Facebook Groups
Find this article at: http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/09/facebook-people-search-engine-is-live.html
web: http://www.labnol.org/ email: amit@labnol.org
Reader Comments
It's not necessary for a page to be linked from other site to get indexed in google search.The site can explicitly ping Google about pages to include for indexing.I think facebook will just need to update the Sitemap listings to include public pages.The Sitemap Protocol allows you to inform search engines about URLs on your websites that are available for crawling.
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/protocol.html
Written on 6/9/07 1:05 AM
Nice pick Ajay but there are some roadblocks:
1. The facebook robots.txt makes no mention of the Sitemap file:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /profile.php
Disallow: /album.php
Disallow: /photo.php
Disallow: /p.php
Disallow: /feeds/
2. One sitemap can have max ~10,000 URLs. If you want to submit multiple URLs, you are are required to create multiple sitemap xml files.
With Facebook having 40 million profiles, I guess that may be a bit tough but not impossible.
Written on 6/9/07 1:14 AM