Facebook will use the Like Button to Personalize Search and Improve ADs
There has been a lot of chatting around the new Facebook’s Like Button. Some people believe it will be great for SEO, other that will increase distribution on Facebook, etc…
But Facebook is smarter than that: they want to create a great search engine, possibly a personalized one, and improve their ADs platform.
Traditional search engines spend a lot of time crawling the web, discovering new pages or updating old ones, and computing the pagerank of each one. What if you could have a graph of the web, updated in real time, with the counts of how many people have been on each page?
This is what Facebook is aiming to do. They do not care if you click that button or not. When the browser renders the page (the button is in a iFrame), it sends a request to Facebook’s server telling them a lot of info about you (e.g., your browser, which page are you on, which language you understand, your IP, your screen resolution, …) and possibly even who you are (e.g., because you logged on Facebook and you still have the cookies around).
Since plugins for the Like button are already widespread for popular content management softwares (e.g., WordPress, Blogger, …) I am sure there will be a wide adoption by content creators.
Facebook will know in real-time about all the new pages created, how many people are visiting them, and who they are (even if you do not have a Facebook account since your browser information are pretty unique). This will allow them to prioritize the crawling and refresh of the pages, compute the ranking based on the popularity (discounting the click on their search results) and also personalize your search results (e.g., ranking higher results visited/liked by your friends, neighbors, etc…).
Augment that with their geo-location project and you also have a pretty good platform for behavioral ADs targeting. They already have a profile of you (you wrote it!), they are about to know where you are (geolocation), and with this they will know the sites that you and your friends visited. This is heaven for the ADs folks.
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