• VentureBeat, Thursday, February 25, 2010 12:09 PM

Ensuring an increasingly open and transparent social universe for us all, status updates from Facebook Pages -- those platforms for marketing rather than personal content -- will now show up in Google's real-time search results. The agreement marks the first time the search giant has indexed content from Facebook in its real-time results, and follows on the heels of similar deals with Twitter and MySpace.

Still, "The key thing to remember, however, is that Google has much more limited access to Facebook's real-time data than its competitor, Bing," notes Digital Beat. "Microsoft has deeper ties to the social network, as an investor in Facebook and as a search provider for the site."

Indeed, Microsoft has the ability to index public status updates, while Google's access is limited to updates from Pages. Yet, "While Bing is getting more data than Google ... it has yet to make any of it findable," Search Engine Land points out. Presently, there are more than 3 million active Pages on Facebook with a total of 5.3 billion "fans."

"That information could occasionally be useful, but the power of real-time search comes from having a large number of contributors," TechCrunch says of Facebook's Pages. "Facebook has a huge amount of data from its 400 million active users, but it isn't sharing most of that with Google."

Also of note, "Unlike Twitter, which is reportedly making money off of its search deals with Bing and Google, Facebook isn't charging the search engines for its data."

Facebook, says Search Engine Land, is likely fine with this arrangement because it brings people back into its fold.

Google, meanwhile, is doing everything in its power to increase its social currency. Buzz was part of that broader effort, along with its recent acquisition of social search service Aardvark for a reported $50 million.

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