Facebook Search Expands to the Web with Open Graph, Google sighs.

June 25, 6:06 PMLA Technology ExaminerDavid Kamerschen

Earlier this week, All Facebook reported that external websites were popping up in user’s search results on Facebook.  A recently adopted protocol by Facebook named Open Graph is the facilitator of this increasingly common phenomenon. 

Open Graph allows webmasters to plant and customize Facebook’s “Like” button onto their web pages.  The results which turn up on Facebook will then be “weighted” in priority by the number of Facebook users who click the “Like” button and associate their account with the external page.

Facebook’s official word:  “The Open Graph protocol enables you to integrate your Web pages into the social graph. It is currently designed for Web pages representing profiles of real-world things - things like movies, sports teams, celebrities, and restaurants. Once your pages become objects in the graph, users can establish connections to your pages as they do with Facebook Pages. Based on the structured data you provide via the Open Graph protocol, your pages show up richly across Facebook: in user profiles, within search results and in News Feed.”

Combined with Facebook’s claim of more than 400 million users, this development means a cluster headache for search giant Google who is already overloaded trying to fend off Apple and Microsoft.

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