Facebook Opening Up User Profiles To Search Engines

It was recently announced that Facebook is opening up their user profiles to be spidered and indexed by the major search engines.

If you’re shy and don’t want your profile to be served up as a result, not to worry. Philip Fung reassures that you can set your privacy permissions to disallow Google and other search engines from displaying your profile as a search result.

In a few weeks, we will allow these Public Search listings (depending on users’ individual privacy settings) to be found by search engines like Google, MSN Live, Yahoo, etc. We think this will help more people connect and find value from Facebook without exposing any actual profile information or data.

As always, if you do not want your public search listing to be visible to people searching from outside of Facebook, you can control that from the Search Privacy page. Please note that you will only appear in searches outside Facebook when your search settings are set to “Everyone”.

If you opt in, searchers will get a glimpse of your profile picture and your name.

What are your thoughts on this change to Facebook’s policy? Will you opt out?