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So Facebook finally showed its hand, it is something we’ve all known was in the works for some time and the reason Google went on a mad dash to create Google Plus.

Today Tech Crunch did an article on Facebook’s so called dirty data saying that a percentage of likes a page has may have been gamed. Here’s my reaction: so what?

When we compare this to Google’s pagerank, do you know how many sites have gamed their seo? 99%. And I’m not defining “gaming” loosely either, remember that crazy Google patent that would do the “Google dance” to your rankings at ANY SIGN of search engine optimization? So yeah.

I unlike Wall Street am incredibly optimistic about Facebook’s new search product. If Zuck can get all the ducks in order, meaning he can provide a more reliable algorithm than Google, good God the world will drastically change.

I’ve theorized before how likes are a stronger signal than links but it bears repeating. By basing how valuable a webpage is based on the likes it has rather than the links pointing to it, as Google does, it is more in line with how things are done in the real world.

The Achilles’ heel in Google’s search algorithm is that links can only be given by webmasters, that is people that own/post content to a website. The majority of web users are not webmasters, so their votes haven’t counted. This has obviously made Google vulnerable to link spam as when commercial interests are involved web masters would naturally do anything to rank. Yes with the recent Penguin and Panda updates, Google has devalued many links gained through these blackhat techniques.

Facebook’s approach is a little better because it gives everyone with a Facebook account a vote -basically a billion people. However, don’t think for a second spammers are not already gaming the like ecosystem. It’s nothing to create a bot that creates millions of fake accounts for the purposes of liking a particular page. The plus side for Facebook is because they are behind a wall they can better create systems to identify spammers and stamp them out as they have done in the past – remember when you had nasty porn showing up in your newsfeed?

While Google has taken proactive steps to protect themselves (i.e. unifying Google accounts, creating Google plus and of course Search Plus Your World) if I was them, I would be a little scared at what Facebook could do to their search business.