Facebook has announced a few Platform updates, including updates to the Live Stream Plugin, “liked” articles appearing in search results, and improvements to real-time updates.
“Consistent with how we treat other Open Graph object types, we’ve introduced the ability to see articles shared by your friends in the search typeahead,” says Facebook’s Namita Gupta.
“For instance, if your friend clicks ‘Like’ on an article at a news site, the article will appear in your News Feed and can now also surface in the search typeahead.”
Is Facebook becoming more of a factor in search? The results, as AllFacebook described upon finding the feature being tested, showed content based on the number of likes and the number of friends who liked the particular object.
“The search results have now become dramatically more relevant with the inclusion of recent news articles, something that previously wasn’t accessible via Facebook’s open graph search results,” AllFacebook’s Nick O’Neill had said.
“Currently, the search results only appear within the drop down from Facebook’s search box, however I’d assume that this will eventually shift to Facebook’s search area, which has yet to undergo a significant overhaul.”
Either way, there is clearly a direct connection between likes and search now. It’s essentially Facebook’s version of PageRank. But the most important thing to keep in mind here is something that has always been true about doing well in search: create good content. If you create compelling content, people will like it and if they use Facebook, they will “like” it.
Considering Facebook has over half a billion users, that has pretty big implications. Facebook has one major thing going for it that search engines don’t – the ability to make content go viral. The more people “like” a piece of content, the more people will share it with others, and the more potential “likes” it can get. The more “likes” it gets, the more it will be exposed through Facebook search.
But is it more important than search?
