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."
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.
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.
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.
mirror (Score:5, Insightful)
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: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.
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?!?
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.
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: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".
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?
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?