This is Bret Taylor, CTO of Facebook. I just wanted to clarify a couple of things because I think people are reading a bit too much into our actions.
First, Open Graph-enabled web pages have been appearing in search since the product launched in April. This is not new and not indicative of a change in strategy.
Likewise, only the pages your friends have liked appear in your personalized search results. While we plan on increasing the pages’ distribution through search in the future, right now, search is not the focus of the team working on product. We are focused on discovery and enabling users to build out their profile by liking things around the web.
So we aren't really declaring war on anyone. But it does make a compelling headline :)
This is Nick. Compelling headline indeed. As I told someone else at Facebook today, unfortunately it's difficult to gain traction without a compelling headline. However the article doesn't specify a specific change in strategy just a continuation of the existing one.
As I posted this morning, declaring war may be a bit of an exaggeration, however most people have been unaware that content off Facebook shows up in search results and that pages can be optimized for such.
At f8 this was announced but not until recently did I begin seeing results that link off-site. The article was a way to illustrate how the Open Graph underlies Facebook's search strategy. Until you show the average user a picture of what that means, theoretical discussion only gets so far.
I hope it wasn't interpreted as a shift in strategy, but a photo is worth a thousand words and a headline can multiply that! You and I (as well as most people on this site) understood the implications of the Open Graph, but the average user had no idea what it meant.
The search results image makes things more apparent. Happy to adjust if you think this is excessive sensationalism ... this is definitely an ambitious search strategy no matter which way you cut it.
First, Open Graph-enabled web pages have been appearing in search since the product launched in April. This is not new and not indicative of a change in strategy.
Likewise, only the pages your friends have liked appear in your personalized search results. While we plan on increasing the pages’ distribution through search in the future, right now, search is not the focus of the team working on product. We are focused on discovery and enabling users to build out their profile by liking things around the web.
So we aren't really declaring war on anyone. But it does make a compelling headline :)