Mind Your Facebook Comments: Soon Accessible via Google Search

  • Google has developed a new indexing plan that marks a shift in its traditionally passive approach.
  • “Mind what you say in Facebook comments,” reports Wired, “Google will soon be indexing them and serving them up as part of the company’s standard search results.”
  • “Google’s all-seeing search robots still can’t find comments on private pages within Facebook, but now any time you use a Facebook comment form on other sites, or a public page within Facebook, those comments will be indexed by Google.”
  • The article suggests the new policy may upset developers and users alike.
  • “There are two primary requests you can initiate on the Web,” explains Wired. “GET requests are intended for reading data, POST for changing or adding data. That’s why search engine robots like Google’s have always stuck to GET crawling. There’s no danger of the Googlebot altering a site’s data with GET, it just reads the page, without ever touching the actual data. Now that Google is crawling POST pages the Googlebot is no longer a passive observer, it’s actually interacting with — and potentially altering — the websites it crawls.”

2 Comments

  1. I guess this is “quantum search” – by observing it is altered…

  2. I guess this is “quantum search” – by observing it is altered…

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