Why tons of Facebook pages will wind up in Google search

In recent months, Google has worked to expand its real-time results – an arena often called the future of search. Google currently crawls Twitter and public listings on sites such as MySpace and FriendFeed. Next stop? Facebook, the reigning king of social media.

In an announcement posted to its official company Twitter feed, Google announced it would set its crawlers loose on Facebook Pages, a section of the network devoted to businesses and organizations. (Worry not – private Facebook profiles are safe from prying eyes.)

"Search is a natural starting point for discovering the world's information," Google reps wrote in a 2009 post introducing real-time search, "and we strive to bring you the freshest, most comprehensive and relevant search results over an ever expanding universe of content."

As Facebook and Twitter enjoy a spike in traffic – Twitter users send 600 tweets a second – there is increased competition on the part of search engines to crawl all those updates. Twitter, for instance, announced a partnership with Yahoo, which is expected to begin searching tweets later this year. We told you all about the repercussions of that deal here.

"From our perspective, this partnership represents a big opportunity. Tweets may be short, but they have proven over and over again to contain valuable information," Twitter founder Biz Stone wrote in blog post.

Ditto for Facebook, which is now the second most popular site on the web. (Learn about the battle for the top three slots in this article.) Many celebrities use Facebook to chat with their fans; many musicians use Facebook to announce upcoming gigs. By hooking up with Facebook, Google ensures a more dynamic search experience.

Here's a question: How long will it take before Google starts crawling Facebook profile pages?

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