Facebook Pages in Real Time Search

Google announced today via their Twitter account that Facebook Fan Page status updates will now become part of the real time search. This is huge for people who seriously consider Facebook as marketing avenue and want to use it as a tool to further get found by search engines.

This means that updates from Facebook Fan Pages are currently being indexed and included in Google’s real time search feature. This includes links, photos, videos and status updates but not comments by fans. While updates from personal profiles can also be posted publicly by users, it doesn’t appear that those updates are being indexed as part of the real time search.

What is Real Time Search?

If you’re not familiar with real time search, here’s an example. Currently trending on Twitter is “Canadian Joannie Rochette” from Olympic events. If you go to Google and type in “Canadian Joannie Rochette,” you will get quite  few results, but if you scroll down about mid-page, this is what you will see:

As you can see, there is a scrolling box which shows real time results as they are happening.

The addition of Facebook page updates to real time search joins Twitter, MySpace, FriendFeed and others. Mostly what I’ve seen so far in real time search are updates from these networks about trending topics. This probably means that big brands on Facebook with large fan bases will likely get the most of amount of love from real time search right now. However, it does become yet another reason why businesses, organizations, non-profits and others need to seriously considering creating a solid presence on Facebook because now it means that just one more way to get yourself found on Google.

NOTE: This post originally appeared on my other blog.

Tags: Facebook Fan Page, Google, real time search

Category: Facebook News, Facebook Pages