Google+ Scores Over Facebook in Link Caching

A few days ago, Aditya covered 5 advantages Google+ has over Facebook. Last week during the unfortunate serial bomb blasts in Mumbai, Pratik Parekh pointed out to another advantage Google+ has over Facebook. This advantage is in link-sharing feature present on both sites.

If you followed social-media after Mumbai Blast closely, then you might have come across Wikipedia article links to Ajmal Kasab’s page being shared all over. Some miscreant had modified Kasab’s date of birth on his wiki page making it 13th July’s which was the day the serial blasts took place in Mumbai.

Like many people, I fell for falsehood and shared the wiki-link over Facebook as well as Google+ at the same time. After few hours, when the error on Wikipedia was resolved, Google+ shared link preview showed corrected date of birth while Facebook link-preview still showed the wrong date of birth.

You can see screenshots below:

Facebook Link Cache

Google+ Link Cache

Is this a big deal?

No. Not at all IMHO. But it certainly shows the care with which Google+ has been designed! 😉

One Comment

Daniel Noll July 24, 2011

Hi Rahul,
Do you know what triggers the update of the Google Plus cache for a given page? I ask because I’m desperately trying to get the correct thumbnails to show up for articles and the home page of our site. (We’ve implemented the og:image opengraph protocol about an hour ago, but Google still shows old, irrelevant thumbnails). Thanks for the help!