Is it just me, or is Facebook acting more and more like a search engine, crawling all sorts of URLs. More than they have in the past. Facebook is acting more and more like a search engine every single day. Here is a perfect example:
If you take a look at the screen capture above from my stats just now, you’ll notice that Facebook Bot is visiting over and over again. But not only are they visiting over and over again, that part I can possibly understand. If someone posts a link in Facebook to a URL then it would make sense that Facebook would visit and check out that URL just to keep Facebook “clean” so to speak. So that there are not any bad links floating around Facebook.
But, in this case, Facebook Bot is visiting FROM a LinkedIn URL, and they are visiting the site FROM a Twitter link. They’re actually crawling, it appears, and the referrer is from Twitter and from LinkedIn.
In this case, I do not believe that people posted the LinkedIn redirect URL in Facebook. I don’t think someone posted the actual Twitter URL in Facebook. If someone had done that, the URL would technically show a referrer from Facebook.com or m.facebook.com, which is showing up in other referrers in my stats.
So, this appears to be Facebook Bot crawling links. Right now I’m seeing referrers from LinkedIn and from Twitter. I haven’t seen any Google+ URls show up (yet) where Facebook Bot is crawling Google URLs.
So, is Facebook Bot really Facebook’s new search engine? Are they crawling? What do you think?
