Google Searches Can Now Unearth Your Facebook Comments

November 2, 2011

Tecca

By Taylor Hatmaker

While you’d have to be quite naive to assume anything you do online can remain private these days, a switch to Google’s search formula will dredge up yet another kind of online activity: your Facebook comments. Google uses a complex algorithm to determine what does and doesn’t appear in a simple search, and that oft-criticized formula is in a perpetual state of flux. While the comments you leave on your friends’ (or enemies’) Facebook walls aren’t yet fair game, it appears that any comment you leave on a website that you’ve logged into with your Facebook account can now pop up in a search.

The formula tweak was confirmed today by Google search guru Matt Cutts through a tweet: “Googlebot keeps getting smarter. Now has the ability to execute AJAX/JavaScript to index some dynamic comments.” Of course, that Googlebot’s new brainpower might not sit well with everyone on the web. It isn’t yet clear how much weight Google will put on indexing old Facebook comments, so if the search giant opts to emphasize fresh comments in its newly-adjusted results, you could be safe for now (if you’ve got something to hide, that is).

Click here for the full article from Tecca.