Written by james | 01 February 2010
Posted in S.E.O

Google’s social search has been restricted from viewing the majority of anybody’s Facebook profile due to their privacy settings. This is making it and other social search tools not as good as they were cracked up to be, as over 350 million people worldwide have been unenclosed in the social searches.

The social searches only have access to public profiles, so status updates, published info, anything little more than age, a picture and a network, will not be viewable by the search engine for people who use Facebook. As Facebook have encouraged more people to share their profiles with ‘more of the net’, with the privacy changes announced when Facebook hit the 350 million users mark, it is only shown to people that are logged in, thus making it incredibly difficult for social searches on search engines to get any information, even statuses and wall posts.

With this happening, we expect the new social search from Google to be hit, but not as hard as Bing, who promised status updates from Facebook in real-time. They are unable to go through with this at present, as members do not yet have the option to make their status updates and wall posts public. Other social searches are suffering as well.

This comes after the internal privacy issues, Facebook were telling people that they should share information with everyone on the internet, a rather misleading statement implying places like these search engines would get what information is needed to run these social searches, but obviously not. And to top that Facebook has not released any plans or comments that suggest they are willing to offer users the option to be recognised by these search engines or other third-parties, even if they want to.