Google Logs Facebook Comments: Going Too Far?
Your Facebook comments can now be searched through Google.
Google has expanded its search capabilities to include AJAX and JavaScript, which makes people’s personal comments public forums available information.
This applies to more than just Facebook, with many sites using Disqus, IntenseDebate, and LiveFyre becoming targets for Google’s addition to their searching system.
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Matt Cutts, a software engineer and head of the webspan team at Google, tweeted that “Googlebot keeps getting smarter. Now has the ability to execute AJAX/JS to index some dynamic comments,” two days ago.
Although it’s unclear exactly what “dynamic comments” means, presumably, any relevant information regarding a search could be collected to help Google users further understand a topic.
The controversy surrounding this has to do with comments that users may have posted publicly, but never intended to be necessarily attached to their names in a search.
For example, if college students were to have a wild night, the event could involve some pictures and comments. The rewrite of Google’s structure would mean that an innocent request for information on someone could reveal hasty remarks attached to that person’s name.
Some web developers who utilize specialized search functions are also miffed that the information only they could previously find is now easily located.
Google now scans forms and posts that information, which was previously only available to those who knew how to specifically request that data.
Comments on the Google Webmaster Central Blog reveal web developers’ disdain.
“Anna” posted this reply: “I don't want Google to use POST to compensate for other developers' lack of knowledge and skill. Why not just write a short guide on how to make AJAX content crawlable?...I put a great deal of effort to make my site crawlable AND user-friendly. Don't touch my forms please.”
Google’s entire intricate explanation of their new system is explained on their blog.
For those who don’t want their website comments searched, the search giant states, “traditional robots.txt directives remain the best method.” Needless to say, non-developers might be hard-pressed to figure out exactly how to do that, although there is a guide on the blog showing how.
Unfortunately, because most individual people don’t own Facebook, there’s little they can do to keep their comments from being searched.
