Its most senior lawyer, Alex Macgillivray, branded the launch a “bad day for the internet” and accused Google of “warping” searchThe site provides examples of search results using the tool, Google was unavailable for comment. We think that's bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users.” Google responded via Google+, entering into an extraordinary public argument with Twitter. Twitter does have a deal with Microsoft to allow Bing, Google’s biggest search engine rival, to index tweets.--A gang of engineers from Facebook, MySpace and Twitter has released a new bookmarklet designed to expose how Google’s People & Pages service favours the ad giant’s own Google+ results at the expense of the rest of the web. Once dragged onto a user’s bookmarks bar, it functions as a kind of search bar for the social web, unlike People & Pages, which as part of Google’s Search Plus Your World service only returns results from Google+.
As Search Engine Land explains, Google also favours its home-grown social networking service in autocomplete results in Google Instant and in sitelinks on its search page. Google, Facebook and Twitter have of course not been the best of pals since Google unveiled its latest attempt to crack the social networking market. A team of engineers at Facebook, Twitter, and some other Web sites have created "Focus on the User," featuring a "don't be evil" bookmarklet that eliminates Google's emphasis on its own Google+ social network.
On Jan. 10, Google launched Google Search Plus Your World, which attempts to reorder search results, factoring in a user's social network. The problem, according to Twitter and others, was that the redesign favored responses and input from only Google's Google+ network—not Facebook and Twitter, both of which offer larger social networks with presumably more relevant content. (By contrast, Focus on the User claims that Google itself buries links to relevant Google+ pages, several results pages down.) Although Google's new search features can be turned off, those sites still protested Google's favoritism.
For example, a video accompanying the Focus on the User site notes that a search for "cooking" turns up a chef Jamie Oliver as a suggested Google+ user, but then links to a Google+ page that hasn't been updated in months. "Would Google's search features return more relevant results if they included the entire social Web, rather than only Google's social network?" the video asks. Google representatives did not respond to requests for comment. Facebook, and Twitter representatives declined to comment.
After visiting Google and performing a search, the bookmarklet can be clicked, reordering the results whether they be on Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Quora, Tumblr, Foursquare, Crunchbase, FriendFeed, Stack Overflow, Github, or Google+. As long as the user doesn't leave the Google page, all subsequent results will be reordered according to the bookmarklet. Focus On the User seems to have concentrated almost exclusively on the right-hand column of results, where Google's Search Plus Your World suggests Google+ users to follow, based on the query.
Social searches still favor Google+ results in the main page. In some cases, the indented "social result" in the main column of search results will also be replaced with what Focus on the User says is a more relevant Facebook or Twitter page. To generate the results for a given query, the bookmarklet does a Google search for each person affiliated with the search terms, looks at the top 10 pages of Google's results, and then picks out the highest-ranked social result as judged by Google. Focus on the User also shows images from networks like LinkedIn, which the site claims Google inexplicably blocks.
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