Google Real-Time Search Now Includes A Fraction Of Facebook Status Updates

Google has just announced via tweet that it’s integrating Facebook Page updates into its real-time search results. Google first revealed that this was coming back in December, when it first started including real-time data in its search results. Other data sources for Google’s real-time results include MySpace and Twitter.

The only problem with the new addition is that Facebook is only granting Google access to updates from its 3 million Pages, which are generally for celebrities, politicians, brands, and local businesses — not your average Facebook user. That information could occasionally be useful, but the power of real-time search comes from having a large number of contributors. Facebook has a huge amount of data from its 400 million active users, but it isn’t sharing most of that with Google. Instead, it’s only granting full acess to user updates to Bing (though that isn’t live yet).  Bing will still only be getting status updates that are shared with “Everyone“, but with its recent privacy overhaul in December, Facebook ensured that it would have far more of those than it used to.

Unlike Twitter, which is reportedly making money off of its search deals with Bing and Google, Facebook isn’t charging the search engines for its data. According to Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land, Facebook is giving away the status updates because they may drive more people back to the social network.

Here’s a sample of some of the updates you can get from Facebook Page updates: