Foursquare talking Search with Google, Yahoo and Bing

Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley has revealed that the location-based social networking service is currently in talks with all major players in the search industry to share the company’s data.

Speaking to the Telegraph, Crowley said Foursquare was discussing partnerships with “everyone” – which would include search kings Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! – to “enrich” their search engines with trends generated by the location-based data.

“We can anonymise data and use it to show venues which are trending at that moment,” Crowley explained, voicing the example of Twitter, which previously signed deals with the three major search players to incorporate real-time information feeds into results.

“Twitter helped the world and the search engines know what people are talking about,” he continued. “Foursquare would allow people to search for the types of place people are going to – and where is trending – not what.”

This is extremely interesting news for both search and social media. Why? Because it ties in directly with the “Real Time” search algorithm which the search engines currently offer. It seems that the search market is trending (ha) towards much more integration with the social spheres. We all need to be aware of this and act appropriately and not behind the ‘black and white anti everything social’ coding attitude which seems to frequent the SEO industry. Integration, Integration people!

As Foursquare signed up its two millionth member last week (doubling its membership since April) it seems only logical that the search engines use this data to impact the SERPs. In the last blog post I wrote I spoke about how  Pew Internet conducted research to show that today’s ‘digital natives’ will continue to share information online well into their adult years. This is something which search results are starting to show thanks to the sharing of information and one can only imagine that it will continue.

Tie this in with a possible deal between the search engines and Foursquare and I think its pretty sure the SERPs will be changed in some big way. Whether this is a positive thing I’m not sure – as presently the Foursquare system is easily abused thanks in part to the fairly lax GPS settings which mean you can sign into a ‘venue’ from a fairly long distance away. A feature which can be abused (unless something is set in place) to impact your clients SERP ranking.

Do you think a possible deal between the Search Engines and ‘faddy’ location based system would be a good idea? Or, is it a good idea?