Facebook has announced Open Graph search, an engine allows the site to search the web based on semantic website information, then display that information in your Facebook search results.
Apart from Google which sends out “Google Bots” to crawl our web pages, Facebook makes websites come to them. Facebook confirmed that “all Open Graph-enabled web pages will show up in search when a user likes them”. The new system allows Facebook to gather website information faster and more accurately than Google, while providing content users want to read, while forcing websites to pair up with Facebook in order to serve their strong user base. Open Graph search also means ranking can be given in real time for websites, ensuring quality is managed by top sites so they can continue to dominate search engine result pages.
Under this system “link baiting” will give rise to “like baiting”, which is how Facebook determines the relevance of information. This has become a full scale attack on Google on all fronts at this point as Facebook has officially entered the internet search market.
Don’t want to use Facebook Share or Like buttons? That’s fine, you just won’t show up in Facebook search. As stated at FastCompany: “It doesn’t need a massive and constantly updating infrastructure to index the Web, Web masters will do its work for it.”
While the new engine is still in the early stages, I recommend you to add “like” feature on your websites to optimize for Open Graph. We haven’t known if Facebook will push full force to the search engine market or not but as the search result pages are officially showing up on Facebook, the war between Facebook and Google has begun.
(via: allfacebook.com)
Not another Search Engine to optimize for!! Noooooo!
Lol, I hope so. But now, we should care more for content than SEO, I think optimizing for Facebook is not as complicated as for Google.
Google has another competitor to fend off but considering how Yahoo and Bing are still struggling for marketshare, I don’t know how well Open Graph will perform.
This system also can be gamed by those with lots of friends who are willing to help like the promoted websites.
I have to say that Facebook and Search has never and still doesn’t made any sense to me at all. Ever since they moved the Search bar into the centre of the navigation bar, I find myself simply frustrated at the lack of other navigation options like it used to be.
Facebook is not a ‘natural’ search destination, and it never has been. When I think of finding information, I naturally think of Google, Twitter, Amazon or Wikipedia. Bing or Yahoo would be other valid destinations, though I never use them.
But Facebook?
I rarely have a valid reason to search on Facebook. That’s not what it’s for. I rarely use the Search bar for anything other than as shortcuts for things that should already be easily navigated (like Pages I have Liked). I can’t ever see myself using it for any other reason.
Facebook’s use case is for catching up with social activity and boredom relief. Thus, all in all, I think this Facebook strategic search move will fail. It doesn’t really make any sense, and all the bleating about the supposed wows of ‘semantics’ doesn’t make me think that Facebook is the go-to place to find proper information.
Thanks for your comment.
I think the Facebook search engine is still useful for some certain type of searches, anything like people’s opinions. We still need to wait for the next step in Facebook’s strategy to determine its market.