I’ve now seen a couple of different comments on Facebook now regarding the new search indexing that’s now on by default for all Facebook users. From what I can tell though, there’s a bit of misinformation.
I think the big fear is that people think unless you uncheck this “Allow Indexing” checkbox then absolutely everything you post on Facebook will now be available to search engines. From my understanding that’s just not the case.
If you read the text under the settings it says (emphasis added by me):
“Allow search engines to access your publicly available info and any information visible to Everyone“
The only thing Facebook is going to allow to be indexed is that information that’s publicly available from their site already, and anything you’ve set to be available to “Everyone” in your new privacy settings that you can configure for different things: i.e., photos, status updates, links, friends, About me, etc.
I’d recommend going into your Settings > Privacy > Profile Information and specifically decide what you want to share and with whom.
It’s also interesting everyone that narrows this down to Facebook is allowing “Google” to have all this information and they’re “indexing” everything. Folks, they’re opening it up to ALL search engines, not just Google and “indexing” isn’t EVIL, it’s what search engines do to collect the information on the web to populate all those search results you’re looking for online.
I’m not sure about the “Facebook Search Results” section, I’ll have to read up on that one.