Why Facebook Open Graph Search is Bad for Bad News

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Not too long ago, Facebook announced the Open Graph protocol. For those of you unaware of what this is, here’s a brief description in their own words:

The Open Graph protocol enables any web page to become a rich object in a social graph. For instance, this is used on Facebook to enable any web page to have the same functionality as a Facebook Page.

While many different technologies and schemas exist and could be combined together, there isn’t a single technology which provides enough information to richly represent any web page within the social graph. The Open Graph protocol builds on these existing technologies and gives developers one thing to implement. Developer simplicity is a key goal of the Open Graph protocol which has informed many of the technical design decisions.

Put simply, that little “like” button that you now see all over the Internet lets Facebook know what pages are more popular than others and when you search for something on Facebook, that plays a large role in to the rankings of the search results. While this is a great system for businesses to help drive more traffic to their site or promote their brand, it will, as Facebook’s open graph continues to grow, be a very bad thing for bad news.

Say, for example, that a terrible earthquake occurs and you read a terrific article about the aftermath of the earthquake and the destruction that it caused. Are you inclined to “like” the devastation of an earthquake? Probably not. Therefore, information that could potentially be critical to the recovery of the earthquake, news about where is safe, aftershocks, and who knows what else will likely never get a “like” click and will suffer in Facebook’s search rankings. See where I’m going with this? Although it is a fantastic new way to interconnect the social web, some thought clearly needs to be put in to the logistics of using a term such as “Like”. In Facebook’s credit, you can already change the button to instead say “Recommend”, but perhaps something like that should be the default, not the second option that few sites use.

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