Yesterday Matt Cutts of Google released a video explaining that Google currently doesn't do any fancy indexing or ranking for Facebook or Twitter pages. He also said that part of that is they don't currently try to extract social data, such as the number of likes or tweets a page gets.
Why? Isn't it good data? Well, yea, it is but here is why, according to Matt:
(1) They don't want to start pouring engineering time into getting this data and then be blocked by Facebook or Twitter. In fact, Matt said they did it once and were blocked. I believe he is talking about when Google real time search was killed because of a deal break with Twitter.
So they don't want to spend all that time capturing and figuring out data that they don't know if they will be blocked from using in the future.
(2) They are worried they can't crawl it fast enough to keep it up to date. Social data changes a lot and fast, so it may insult someone if they change their relationship status from one thing to another.
But Matt adds they will and do plan on doing this in the future. Ten years down the road or soon? I believe we should expect it sooner than later. They are actively working on a subject authority ranking and this is a large piece of it.
Here is the video, worth a watch:
Forum discussion at Twitter.
