Google Unveils (Limited) Facebook Integration

Posted Tuesday 8th December 2009 by Ben J in Social Media.

The Update Deluge


icon_google_clockYesterday was a busy time in the world of Google, with a veritable deluge of news and updates including Google Goggles and the release of one million more Google Wave invites but the really big deal is their inclusion of real-time search results.

There’s been talk of real-time being the future of search for a long time, and with the world’s biggest engine implementing it yesterday, it seems that the future’s finally here – or at least the beginning of the future. Google’s real time results appear in a sliding box in the regular search engine results page and are updated constantly. It’s certainly a step towards a fully-realised real-time search function for Google, and it looks like they’ve become the frontrunners in the “real–time arms race” between them and Microsoft since both parties announced their intentions towards regularly updated results in October.

What’s Included

It’s all well and good with Google incorporating real-time feeds in their search results, but what is being indexing to provide them? The simple answer is: social media sites such as Yahoo Answers, Twitter and even Facebook, which regular users will know is expanding on its own real time results after the acquisition of FriendFeed.

Social media is the perfect choice for helping bolster real time results since many of these sites are all about telling users what’s going on right now, whether that is in a broadcast manner such as Twitter or the more private feed offered by Facebook, and including these into SERPS is certainly an excellent way to bring real time to Google.

What’s The Catch?

There’s always a catch, especially when companies as large as Google and Facebook are concerned. In this case, the catch is that Facebook have limited the amount of information they’re allowing Google to access and thus index. Only public pages are being included in results, not profiles, so on the one hand, this is good from a privacy point of view, but on the other, it would seems that it will limit Facebook’s usefulness in real-time Google SERPS.

However, this is certainly good news for Twitter who have allowed Google full access to all Tweets except those which users have chosen to protect. This integration could help them to increase their market share in the social media field and potentially with the revenue streams that they are planning for the New Year.

Google vs Bing

What is interesting in this, however, is that while Facebook have limited the information they’re offering to Google, they will be providing Microsoft’s Bing with full access to profiles. Microsoft invested $240 million into Facebook for not just a share of the company, but also preferential treatment in the search arena, and in this case, Bing will have full access to Facebook, as well as all the Twitter feeds and whichever other real-time options they are implementing.

The real-time search war has just begun and the winners and losers remain to be seen. Both engines have their advantages and disadvantages in this contest, but as it stands right now, Google have drawn first blood.

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