This afternoon Facebook posted an update advertisements stating that pages you’ve become a fan of will soon be listed in your public search listing. This means that when people search for you in Google or even in Facebook, there will be additional details about you that are now displayed. All of this can be controlled via your search privacy settings page.

For a sample of what a public search listing looks like, take a look at the screenshot I’ve provided below. This means that there is potentially additional promotional opportunity for fan pages. The only problem is that users can’t select what pages are displayed within their public search listing. For example, the majority of my fan pages are related to Facebook.

While the photos of my friends in my public search listing appear to rotate, my fan page listings don’t appear to rotate currently. I’m guessing that this will eventually change given that the search functionality is not yet live. It’s definitely a small addition but it will definitely impact the search engine optimization of fan pages as links to those pages will show up for user’s public search listings in Google.