Facebook Search just threw down the Google-flavored gauntlet.

There were a lot of questions when Facebook first started talking about the Open Graph.  Today, those questions were just answered.

All Facebook has an article confirming the suspicions of many: Facebook has just entered the search market game.  Facebook has confirmed to the site that the Open Graph is now linking OG-enabled pages into Facebook search results.

Facebook’s Like feature just became even more important, as well.  Likes will be the measure by which Facebook lists the relevance of results in the search frame.  With this in mind, semantic search just took another huge leap forward.

So what’s next?  All Facebook takes the words right out of our mouths.  It’s time for site owners to find out how their results will look in Facebook Search, and to optimize their sites accordingly.  We’re likely to start seeing a huge push for Facebook users to “Like” pages, as the importance of this grows.