Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace To Google: Don't Be Evil 208
An anonymous reader writes "Over the weekend, Blake Ross, Facebook's product director and co-founder of Firefox, worked with Facebook engineers Tom Occhino and Marshall Roch to demonstrate how evil they think Google's newly launched Search plus Your World (SPYW) feature really is, and created a 'proof of concept' showing how it should really work. His team got some help from Twitter engineers and Myspace engineers, and consulted other social networks as well to really make sure the message hits home: SPYW should surface results from all social networks, not just Google+. By leveraging Google's own algorithms, the group built a bookmarklet called 'don't be evil' (a jab at Google's informal motto) and released it on a new website named Focus on the User."
Don't Be Evil (Score:1, Troll)
So, how does it work? If Google’s search engine decides that it’s relevant to surface a Google+ page in response to a query where Google+ content is hardcoded, the tool searches Google for the name of the Google+ page and identifies the social profiles within the first ten pages of Google’s search results (top 100 results). The ones Google ranks highest, regardless of what social network they are from, replace the previous results that would only be from Google+.
In my opinion this demonstrates perfectly that it's entirely possible for Google. It's just that they don't want to do it - they want more control for themselves and more information about users for advertising and marketing
Re:Don't Be Evil (Score:5, Insightful)
So tell me, why Facebook data isn't open for everyone? That's control too, isn't it?. And do you remember when twitter said "no" to Google for use Twitter data on Google Social Search?
You should inform yourself before commenting, please.
Re:Don't Be Evil (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Don't Be Evil (Score:5, Interesting)
Sources or didn't happen.
What I recall was facebook declining access to google unless they payed shitloads of money (there was even a spat because they blocked google and then google blocked facebook access to gmail) and twitter wanting shitloads of money to grant access to their message stream.
They wanted to monetize their information so bad google thought it would be cheaper to launch their own social network... That's saying something.
Now that they kind of "succeeded", they cry.
Either way, no search engine should be giving social media results, but that's my personal opinion.
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Most of the best and relevant search signals are social....if you properly curate your graph with people who give information that you find valuable.
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oh, I'm not against using social network data to rank searches, what I'm against is getting people involved.
google has been crawling my e-mails for data, or even tracking my interests for ages, and as long as I was user #124517851 that's fine. Names make it way too personal and creepy.
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but you have already established relationships via social networking with the people you are getting search results on. How is that Creepy?
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Why should Google pay for the privilege of promoting Twitter and Facebook?
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So you're saying Google's missing out on opportunity to invade on your privacy with the data FB wants to sell them?
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They aren't paying for the privilege of promoting Twitter and Facebook, they're paying for the privilege of accessing them to use them search rating valutations.. They do it already, but in limited scope. When site is mentioned in Facebook or Twitter (now only publicly), it affects their rankings. They use them as metric. Likewise they can use it for targeting advertising.
So the only way for Google to not be evil is to pay Facebook and Twitter lots of money "for access to their data." Please pardon my tiny violin here. If Google were filtering out Facebook, that would be one thing. Refusing to cough up extortion money or payola is another. Sounds like Google is doing nothing unethical here. And if you think that Google is making a poor business decision, then encourage someone else -- Bing or Yahoo for example -- to do it and eat Google's lunch in the process. Until th
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Correct, they aren't paying them at all.
Viewed in that light, its a question of the value of the signal compared to the offered price. The fact that it is viewed as worthwhile to Bing doesn't mean its worthwhile to Google.
But, as the current fury from FaceTwitterSpace about Google not using public, non-personalized profiles from their networks that se
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I really don't like it (the Google+ Search).
I searched my name to see what came up, and my private from phone folder was across the top of the page.
I don't like the personalization of my search in this way, I don't want checking my email to bring up semi-private photos if my name is typed in.
I want google.com to search the web, not my profile, let me search my profile if that's what I want.
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Click on the Settings icon -> Search Settings -> Do not use personal results.
There, that wasn't so hard.
Personally, I just don't have a G+ account due to the other issues that are in my opinion way worse than personalized search.
Re:Don't Be Evil (Score:4, Insightful)
So, what, you want to restrict how discoverable information is to the recipients after you've actively shared the infromation with them?
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But others could already view that information through G+ directly. Having Search integration doesn't change what others can view. So that complain is completely offtopic.
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But there's no spying! You're only shown what you already have access through G+! So non-G+ users only get public G+ content, that they could already view.
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wait.... YOU searched YOUR name and were surprised that it was public to YOU?
Search from someone's computer who does not connect with you on line and see what the rest of the world will see before you freak out.
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but it is coming up ONLY FOR YOU! Perhaps Google should allow a content status to be something like "exclude from search results" but really....what are you doing uploading a picture that you want to only see in a closed dark room by yourself?
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You should inform yourself before commenting, please.
If you do a simple search, you will see Google has never had any trouble indexing public Twitter or Facebook information. Google simply wanted more than just the public information, they wanted the private data thats locked behind those profiles.
You should inform yourself before commenting.
Slashdot just loves every Google smear campaign (Score:2)
Seriously, is there anybody who can't see though this?
Re:Don't Be Evil (Score:5, Insightful)
Try feeding Facebook pages through Google Translate as I did recently trying to follow up a foreign news story. You will find that Facebook does a considerable load of blocking to make life difficult for Google. We also know that Twitter wants to charge for access to the data. This whole story is attempting to blame Google for the evil that Facebook and Twitter have done to themselves.
It's really funny the way that there's this big campaign recently by several companies which are obviously evil (Microsoft, Facebook etc.) against Google. I'm guessing that they are afraid that if someone started insisting that more companies weren't evil they would lose their competitive edge?
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.. For Google too. In fact you can find public Facebook pages in their normal search, too.
What you mean by this is Facebook is just another Google spammer. I tried searching for a local business, and pretty high up is a Facebook page, but you find out it is a "business directory" page that Facebook created for themselves from phone book info just to get web hits and undermine my ability to see relevant information from the business' real pages.
Re:Don't Be Evil (Score:5, Insightful)
new account, same anti-google? [slashdot.org] Jesus christ you guys multiply like tribbles.
The reality here is that putting this on google is focusing on a strawman to mislead people to the fact that it is facebook that prevents google from indexing it, not vice versa.
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Honestly dude, troll harder. You're focusing on bullshit again. How many times will you do this with how many accounts? Is this 5? 10? in the last week?
Of course public information is scraped. That's not the point. You could publicly scrape anything whether anyone wants it or not. The reality here is the strawman of focusing on that, yet again. But yes, it must be google, they must be evil. Uh, no.
Oh wait, here's the humor and irony:
to get to http://www.facebook.com/apps/site_scraping_tos.php [facebook.com] - you have t
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That's redundant because neither is private google+ data.
I think the landscape of the internet has changed too much, google is competing with facebook (google+), twitter (buzz, though it failed), and myspace (what competition, these guys still around??). Business 101 implies you do not offer your services to competitors. Google does have one big thing the rest don't, and that's a search engine, it kind of screws fb and twitter that they leverage it against them, but it's theirs to leverage.
At least google
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Perhaps you should do some more advanced courses.
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Cognratulations, you demonstrated that Google - gasp - has access to publicly available information on Twitter and Facebook. The only thing you've done is rearranged where the results appear. What exactly was the point of this exercise? To prove that Google does not have a filter for social networks? Congratulations. The easy solution is to have that filter appear where all the other filters are: in the right left sidebar, among images, news, etc.
I'm wondering what kind of crap reason Facebook will come up
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Yep. Here's the difference: a different Search is a click away. A different OS is.... about a full day's worth of work away. Visiting one site does not impact my ability to visit a different site. Using one OS does impact my ability to use another OS. See the difference?
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I'm guessing it's the "paid to not understand" part as there has been a new bout of desperation represented by new usernames lately which all cater to the anti-google, pro microsoft, pro facebook concept and somehow think that the average slashdotter (who is a techie) is going to be unaware that they're all funded by the same group. They also first post articles and think people won't notice the sockpuppetry. Comedy, at best.
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At this point, you're just lying about the compromising their search. To be clear: at no point did anyone show that the SEARCH RESULTS were bad. They were complaining about the fact that Google was showing results for its Google products in an area NEXT to the SEARCH RESULTS. Which is an idiotic complaint about a UI decision.
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Considering you can't even properly format your sentences, I doubt you are in a position to judge anything.
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The video of the proof of concept looks actually awesome, and much better than how Google is doing it now. It's also much better for the user since it pulls the content from all social networks and other relevant sites. Interestingly, they're using Google's own search engine to do this:
Agreed... but for one thing, I hardly ever find Twitter relevant for anything, but thanks to its nature it will dominate every search. Twitter, thanks to its format, gets generally much higher "follower" counts, but each message has much less content than a Google+ or Facebook post (which isn't saying much), Twitter has a much higher single to noise ratio.
The best solution would be to return results from services that the user actually uses (and thus cares about). Sadly this would require a fair bit of i
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Twitter has a much higher single to noise ratio.
That's true - married people don't have time for it.
Re:Don't Be Evil (Score:5, Informative)
Oh hai, DCTech. New account for a new story you posted, right? Well, here's a quick summary of why Facebook and MySpace are full of crap, and Twitter is irrelevant:
* There's the standard complaint that links on top of the search results are an unfair promotion of Google's own data. Well, no shit sherlock. It's their own site, and they can show their own links whereever the hell they want. It's marked as not part of the search results, so I don't see how this could possibly be read as cooking the results. Unless, of course, you're Facebook and are trying to poison the debate.
* The focusontheuser.org page is also misleading in what it calls "on top of the search results". In the video, they clicked on the G+ link that specifically says "Here are the G+ results for your search", not on the general search results. Then they complain they get taken to the G+ page. I'm confused on how that was a surprise.
Essentially, what this is is a general bitch session by Facebook that Google shows Google products in the areas that are dedicated to Google products. Really? That's a problem? If Facebook is unhappy about how Google displays Facebook results, I have a suggestion for them: create your own search engine. Make it exactly as platform agnostic as it was shown on the focusontheuser.org site. Then go talk about Google doesn't offer the best possible search engine. In the meantime, this comes across as nothing but a giant astroturfing campaign by Facebook to force Google to show Facebook and Twitter results in an area that Google has set aside for its own products.
That said, there are some interesting ideas in there on how Google can improve its search:
* default opt-out for showing my G+ info. I know when to look for it, thanks.
* In the left sidebar, include a social network section. Filter specifically on known social networks. Have it even be customizable to only show results from a user-defined list of social networks.
But that's it. There's absolutely no need to have FB and Twitter results show up in the right side-bar, which is explicitly dedicated to Google product results. Not unless you want to essentially force Google to advertise Facebook and Twitter results for free.
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default opt-out
The word you're looking for is "opt-in". ;)
Re:Don't Be Evil (Score:5, Insightful)
In my opinion this demonstrates perfectly that it's entirely possible for Google. It's just that they don't want to do it
...and in other news, McDonalds doesn't want to sell Burger King's hamburgers, despite the fact that it's entirely possible for them to do so. A Burger King spokesman decried this blatant favoritism as "evil".
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You've got to ask yourself at the end of the day: how much do I really care about this?
Seriously, who actually uses google to find fb and twitter posts when those sites have their own search?
This is about $, not ethics, in the sense of fb and twitter and myspace wanting to make more with google's good will this time. Sounds more like a jest / proof of ethics than an actual feature request.
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Seriously, who actually uses google to find fb and twitter posts when those sites have their own search?
The same statistical first-timers who are always one minute away from *joining* said sites? There's millions registering all the time just to connect with those they've not talked with since highschool. For FB, they have no access to the posts unless they too join the club. ~90% of the world's 7,000,000,000 people are still *outside* of facebook's 700 million "active account-holders." Just because WE know the web inside down does not mean that most others discovered social media already.
The same people who
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Great, so i think it's more than fair to say, if you don't have a fb account, don't use fb? Surely money is not the issue here when it comes to fb accounts lol. Not sure what your expecting from them lol. There's an old phrase that comes to mind though: want much, get little.
Re:Don't Misunderstand (Score:2)
No, the video shows these people have no idea what SPYW is all about.
Google is not searching for the most relevant results. It is searching for the most relevant results, plus your world. If your world includes Jamie Oliver's FaceBook page, that will come back in the "your world" results, not search results.
And, Google doesn't have links to *your* facebook, myspace, etc. Just the public information. So that's not your world, it's just a social search. They say this is how the algorithm works. Take the
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No, the video shows these people have no idea what SPYW is all about.
This is what I was thinking.
I did a very quick test (so take with a grain of salt): I checked my Google+ stream for something recent that I could search for (I saw a news story posted about a compary called "Delta"). I then did a search for that term ("delta" in this case), and there was the option to see the personalised results - this included the news item that I had seen, so something very relevant (as it was part of my "world" as Google says). I used the bookmarklet to see what the "don't be evil" had
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Vaccum? Are we talking about the company that's suing others for having their own implementation of Microsoft's incredibly innovative algorithm that turns "reallybigfilename.txt" into "REALLY~1.TXT" and stores both?
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that was on DOS...this is the web... totally different things... just like how all the desktop metaphor from the PC are new and innovative on a small 4 inch touch screen device.
Ironic.. (Score:5, Insightful)
..considering reports the Google's entire motivation for creating Google+ was that so much content was moving to social networks such as Facebook and that said social networks were pushing against Google's attempts to index the content on their services.
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It's not ironic. It's a direct response to Google's claims:
The team’s goal is to show Google is lying because the search giant already indexes all public information on social networks, and there’s no reason why it can’t use that data as well.
Personally, I do not know who's telling the truth, and I can't say I like Facebook very much, but I'm hoping that more people actually read the article before rehashing Google's claims (which the article is already responding to).
To the one who erected the wall ... (Score:2)
All these FUDs amount to one thing, and one thing only --->
Those erected the walls that kept everyone away from their precious exclusive walled garden think that all the Netizens are as brainless as the users of their walled gardens
They think that we Netizens who grew up OUTSIDE their pathetic walled gardens would believe in their FUDs
Grow up, FaceBook !! Learn to compete in the real world !!
Facebook has no room to speak (Score:2)
Wait...who told whom what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Facebook? Facebook is telling Google not to be evil? FACEBOOK? If Google were half as self-serving with privacy policies and use of data as Facebook has been....actually, it would be so awful I don't even know how to put it into words.
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not just facebook, supposedly myspace which was owned by murdoch, who clearly is not an evil fellow, right?
ahhh, the comedy. It's another "accuse someone else of what you're doing so that they don't focus on you at all". aka the political/microsoft way to do things.
Re:Wait...who told whom what? (Score:5, Informative)
Facebook? Facebook is telling Google not to be evil? FACEBOOK?
That was my initial reaction. If it were Mozilla or Wikipedia telling Google to be less evil, that would be one thing. But Facebook, one of the more evil companies on the planet, beseeching Google not to be evil?
This is why I could never work in the corporate world. I understand that spewing this type of bullshit is par for the course, but I would have never been able to stomach it.
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Ditto and if someone is in a position to complain it would be Mozilla since integrated search should be a browser feature, not a website feature, and they aren't complaining, because it's stupid.
Blubbled search [dontbubble.us] is not even a feature I want, much less expand.
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That was my initial reaction. If it were Mozilla or Wikipedia telling Google to be less evil, that would be one thing. But Facebook, one of the more evil companies on the planet, beseeching Google not to be evil?
Considering Mozilla takes money from Google, I wouldn't be inclined to trust their opinion (or lack of) either.
Re:Wait...who told whom what? (Score:5, Funny)
Facebook? Facebook is telling Google not to be evil? FACEBOOK?
I dunno, the story lost all credibility for me when I read the phrase 'MySpace engineers'....
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Re:Wait...who told whom what? (Score:4, Funny)
Maybe it was a typo and they really meant to say "My Space Engineers"....
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mirror (Score:5, Insightful)
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Pot, kettle, Kettle, pot.
More like: Pot, Kettle, Cauldron; meet Stainless Steel Soup Pot. Stainless Steel Soup Pot, meet Pot, Kettle, and Cauldron.
Well, yeah - that Stainless Steel Soup Pot may be well used and have a bit of black on it too; but nothing like the Pot, Kettle, and Cauldron which were black even when brand new.
oh the hypocrisy (Score:1)
Facebook criticizing ANYONE regarding privacy? That's not just ironic, it's downright hypocritical.
Really all four of those companies are equally evil little shits. Fuck 'em all.
Leave search alone (Score:5, Insightful)
Am I the only one who wants to search for the words I type in and nothing else. Google is already giving some kind of preference for the results in my area whether I want it or not, and now apparently it is going to pollute them with more random junk. When I searched for a solution to a particular known problem with my car, it mixed in a bunch of completely irrelevant results just because they are to do with cars in my city. I guess no software company is immune to suicide by features phenomenon.
Re:Leave search alone (Score:4, Informative)
and now apparently it is going to pollute them with more random junk
No, not unless you click the little "My World" tab at the top of your search, like you do to access Google Image Search, or Video Search.
Re:Leave search alone (Score:4, Insightful)
This is one of the reasons why people switched away from Altavista to Google. Granted, it's not the main reason, but it's one of the reasons.
I hate how over-helpful Google is. It seems like there's no way to do a simple search any more. It tries to correct my spelling, searches for what it thinks I meant, and mixes in results that don't even have my search terms in them! It's frustrating as hell. I'd switch to something else, but there really isn't anything that's any better.
It's gotten to the point that I put everything in quotes, with a plus sign, no matter what I search for. Otherwise, I end up getting completely irrelevant results. There needs to be an option in the advanced search options that says, "[x] I'm not an idiot".
Re:Leave search alone (Score:5, Interesting)
There needs to be an option in the advanced search options that says, "[x] I'm not an idiot".
There is. Left bar -> More Search tools -> Verbatim
"With the Verbatim tool, you can search using the exact keywords you typed," explains Google. Verbatim disables Google's spelling corrections and Google no longer replaces some of your keywords with synonyms (e.g.: television / TV), similar terms (e.g: buy flowers / send flowers), words with the same stem (e.g.: fixing / fix). Verbatim also disables search personalization.
I submitted this as a story a month ago or so, but it wasn't accepted by the /. editors.
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add "&tbs=li:1" to the end of the URL, without the quotes of course
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And if you really love verbatim so much, modify your bookmarlet or search URL to include that.
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Well, yeah. Of course, we all "just want the words we search"
But this isn't 1996, the web has trillions of pages of content. If you search for The Police do you want the local constable or the band of the same name? What about Anthrax? Do you want the band or the infectious disease? If you want the disease, do you want a Wikipedia-level reference, or the CDC, or do you want to know about recent news involving it? Or do you want to know conspiracy theories, or how to weaponize it?
Oh, and how would you like
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Easy fix. Upper-right corner of the search results: click "hide personal results" (the globe icon). If you want to get rid of them permanently: settings drop-down, "Do not use personal results" radio button.
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No, but you are the only person who doesn't bother to learn the tool they are using before complaining.
Haha, I joke, many people are whiny bitches that don't bother to figure out the tool before complaining.
Initial thoughts... (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Their definition of "don't be evil" seems to be "please don't compete with us directly".
2) Facebook has already created the largest walled garden on the Internet by a couple orders of magnitude - maybe before trying to "fix" other companies' software *they* should start looking at ways to include other social networks and web sites without requiring a post/link into Facebook's database and a sneaky redirect...
3) Wait, Myspace has engineers?!?
Re:Initial thoughts... (Score:4, Informative)
It's not so much "focus on the *user*" as much as "focus on OUR *users*".
Their example is accurate, and I agree that it would be great to can-open Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc.... So.... is Facebook asking Google to actually do this? Because last I checked they were still trying to find ways to prevent FB data from crossing over to Google+.
-CF
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Google tried in the past to allow tweets and Facebook content searchable by their engine - Facebook wouldn't allow it, the Twitter deal fell through too.
Facebook has tried their hardest to set up a walled garden, and it just bit them in the ass. boo-hoo.
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Yeah - I think the perfect summary is "walls work both ways"...
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That's not quite it: it is "please do more (at no cost to us) to promote our services that compete with yours directly."
Well then... (Score:2)
Perhaps facebook could open up their APIs so that other social networks would have a fighting chance of getting into existence, and we'd actually see some competition.
And perhaps twitter could do the same, so that we can choose whichever company we want as a tweet-service. Imagine that e-mail was handled by one company, quite a ridiculous situation!
Hypocrisy at its finest (Score:5, Insightful)
Twitter to Google: "You can't search or index our content. You need to pay us millions of dollars to get a feed of our data"
Twitter to Media: "Google isn't searching and index our content! They're being evil!"
Give me a break. Twitter and Facebook put up walled gardens and prevented Google from crawling them, forcing Google to make their own social network and now that it's a threat, they pay PR firms to smear Google in the media and complain that they're not being included in new Google features. You want to be included? Set robots.txt to allow the googlebot to crawl your site.
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Exactly... Twitter can't have it both ways but are clearly trying..
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Pot calling the kettle black (Score:2)
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Well, maybe Facebook should swallow a heaping teaspoon of its own advice. After all, they were being evil about user privacy. Even Mark Zuckerberg deluded himself into believing that users don't care about privacy.
Deluded?
Most users dont care about privacy. They'll happily trade privacy for recognition. Why the hell do you think so many people try out for reality TV.
LOL (Score:5, Funny)
Scraping of data (Score:2)
Is Facebook fine with Google scraping data from their network? If Google did that without asking, wouldn't that make Google evil?
If Facebook is voluntarily offering up said data, then certainly Google should use it.
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Facebook (and Twitter, et al.) seem to be saying this: "We are going to do everything we can to stop you from getting our data, unless you pay us vast amounts of money to get access to it; but, if you do manage to index any of our data, we demand that you use it as much as possible to promote our
As long as it's optional (Score:2)
SPYW should surface results from all social networks, not just Google+.
As long as you can turn this off - first time I googled myself after SPYW was introduced I nearly s#@! a brick thinking all those Picasa pictures got somehow indexed for everyone to see.
It would be fitting (Score:2)
It would be fitting if the majority of users who were directed to the myface site concluded that they actually liked, or wanted to use google's features now that someone let them know they were there...
How stale is the social data? (Score:2)
Maybe I'm behind, but didn't Google stop crawling FB / Twitter / etc data after their deals went south.
If they had, then the social data would be stale.
And who wants stale social data?
They're describing DuckDuckGo (Score:2)
They're describing exactly the sort of results that http://duckduckgo.com/ [duckduckgo.com] gives; try the equivalent search for "john battelle" [duckduckgo.com], for example: it lists a whole slew of social-networking pages for him in the `social networking bar'. Right after his Wikipedia page and his official website.
That is the pot calling the kettle black (Score:2)
in other news (Score:2)
Charles Manson sent out a heart-felt message to school bullies telling them to be nicer to the other kids.
Advice to Facebook, Myspace, Twitter et all... (Score:2)
Stop being isolated islands. Google could use your data, but you won't supply it on an open, federated basis. So what should Google do about that?
Haha. (Score:2)
Companies about to become irrelevant think replacement is evil.
What a joke.
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At least you can turn that stupid search plus your world shit off. I mean, they could have just done it and not given the option, which, if you've seen how retarded the results can be if you have a lot of people in your circles on G+, would have been goddamned awful and totally depreciated any value Google had for search, imho...
I wish Google would have let us keep the old style search page and shit, rather than the new one with all the drop-downs...
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You can disable the G+ personalization in the Search settings.
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If you don't want to share anything publicly, don't share anything publicly. Then it doesn't matter if someone adds you to their circles, because they won't see your posts and there's nothing to influence their search results. If you choose to share something publicly, is it a problem if people can find that information when they search for it? If so, why are you sharing it publicly?
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"It amazes me that so much of the tech world continues to fawn over them."
Did it occur to you that you are wrong?