Facebook status updates to appear in Google search results

Major changes are coming to the way Facebook users find information about their favourite organizations, companies and celebrities on the world’s most popular social networking site. Google has decided to add status updates posted by millions of celebrities and organizations active on Facebook to its main search engine. While the updates posted by individual Facebook users will continue to remain private, Google has indicated that its crawlers would make all other material on the social networking site fully searchable. This means that companies that have developed Facebook profile pages will be even easier to locate and will gain much greater visibility, as any links, blogs, status updates or other information posted on these pages will appear in Google’s new real-time search feature.

Now that statistics show Facebook to be the world’s second most popular website in terms of daily visits, a growing number of companies realize that one of the best ways to reach out to their clients and keep them informed of new products and services is by setting up a Facebook page and gathering “fans.” The fact that Google will make all of these pages searchable through its main engine will likely serve as an incentive for even more small and medium-sized businesses to enter the world of Web 2.0 technology and joins industry giants.

But Google is hardly the only search engine to realize the importance of working with social networking sites, in order to add relevant and updated content to search results. Yahoo, for example, signed a deal with Twitter and will begin crawling the nearly 600 tweets that are posted each second by the micro-blogging site’s users.