Google Showing Facebook Friends On Profile URLs

Google Blogoscoped reported that Google seems to be testing showing Facebook friends in the Google search results for some Facebook profile URLs. For example, a search for facebook marissa mayer, I see the following search snippet: Why is this showing up? As Philip notes, it doesn’t seem like Facebook is using the rich snippets markup […]

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Google Blogoscoped reported that Google seems to be testing showing Facebook friends in the Google search results for some Facebook profile URLs. For example, a search for facebook marissa mayer, I see the following search snippet:

google facebook snippet

Why is this showing up? As Philip notes, it doesn’t seem like Facebook is using the rich snippets markup for Google to show this richer snippet data. In fact, I doubt Facebook would want to give Google more of their data, to expose in the public Google search database.

This does appear to be very similar to how Google showed dates and forum thread details in the search results as well as the early on reviews.


About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a technologist and a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics.

In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the "US Search Personality Of The Year," you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O'Clock.

Barry can be followed on X here and you can learn more about Barry Schwartz over here or on his personal site.

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