Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace To Google: Don't Be Evil 208
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by
Soulskill
from the you-guys-should-team-up-and-start-a-search-engine dept.
from the you-guys-should-team-up-and-start-a-search-engine dept.
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."
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.
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
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: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.