Facebook decided to make available Facebook user profile information to the search engines. According to the official Facebook blog, the amount of information that would be visible is less than a new user would be able to see in other profiles right after sign-up. Anyway, the idea is that Facebook wants to help people who are not on Facebook find you, and what better way than to allow search engines to index this information and show it in search results.

Public Search Listings will be allowed in a few weeks, but they will only be allowed for user profiles where the individual security and privacy settings have been set accordingly. Allowing your profile to be available to the search engines should help you be more easily found on Google, Live, Yahoo… Facebook hopes this will allow more people to get in touch more easily without compromising personal information.

Here is a screen capture collage that should help you see the upcoming change:

Facebook has been criticized for being a walled garden endeavor, which doesn’t allow API access to only a small part of its content that can be shown on other sites. Meanwhile, Facebook applications seem to be becoming the “next big thing” in social networking and the internet in general, allowing plenty of diversity, but within the Facebook platform. By allowing profile information to be indexed by search engines Facebook may have created yet another influx channel. There will be millions of pages in search indexes about Facebook users (and Facebook) for searches related to personal names and profiles. In the future, I expect Facebook will probably open other privacy regulated content for indexing which would yield another couple of million pages in search indexes.

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