ReCrunch

[TC] People Search Business Just Got More Complicated As Facebook Enters Market:

Facebook just announced that they are now allowing public searches of their users by people without Facebook accounts. … To the extent any one service such as Facebook (or LinkedIn, etc.) gather lots of centralized information about a large group of people and then make it available for general search, these people search engines become much less important. If these startups were public entities, their market valuations would dip today.

So now anyone can find out if John Smith has a Facebook account without signing up. Revolutionary! To actually view anything besides a thumbnail, though, you still need to get an account. Back to square one. I guess nothing really changed after all.

Perhaps it’s just an SEO trick. From their blog entry:

In a few weeks, we will allow these Public Search listings (depending on users’ individual privacy settings) to be found by search engines like Google, MSN Live, Yahoo, etc.

Seems like an easy way to add millions of additional pages to Google’s index. More pages in the index lead to more hits lead to higher advertising revenue. This is something that others have been taking advantage of already. Rapleaf, for example, has been crawling social networks and making that data publlic for a while now.