Engineers from Facebook, Twitter and Myspace took matters into their own hands after being excluded from Google’s new social search. Search Plus Your World, unveiled earlier this month, allows social content such as photos and posts from the people you follow on Google+ to be included in regular Google search results. The functionality also aids the discovery of people related to a particular search.
The addition to Google search sparked an antitrust debate from Facebook and Twitter who argued that Google knowingly excluded results from other social sites. Google responded by saying that it simply did not have enough data available to include Facebook, Twitter and other social sites into the Search Plus Your World results.
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As noted earlier by Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land, there is plenty of public data available for Google to include Facebook and Twitter in parts of its new functionally, should it really want to. In a strange turn of events, engineers from Facebook, Twitter and Myspace lowered their arms and created a tool that would include social results from the rival networks in Search Plus Your World.
The tool is a browser bookmarklet called, “Don’t Be Evil” which changes three parts of Search Plus Your World that currently only show information from Google+.
These are:
- People & Pages results
- Google+ Sitelinks
- Google+ Suggestions in Autocomplete
The tool can be found on the Focus On The User web site. The “Don’t Be Evil” moniker takes a stab at Google’s philosophy of wanting to focus on what’s best for users, rather than what’s best for Google. In this case, however, the companies behind the tool argue that Google hasn’t focused on what’s best for its users. The “Don’t Be Evil” tool shows clearly that Google could make changes to at least three aspects of Search Plus Your World, if it really wanted to.
