When Developers Attack? When Google launched...

When Developers Attack?

When Google launched Search Plus Your World it integrated social search into its results.

The big problem, as critics pointed out, was that social meant Google+ posts from your circles of friends and acquaintances. This diminished the integrity of search results as posts on Twitter, Facebook and other social networks that might be much more relevant to the original query were ignored.

Google’s response was that Twitter and Facebook don’t give the search engine access to their data so they moved forward with what they could do, namely include Google+ results.

But last weekend developers from Facebook, Twitter and Myspace got together for a hackathon to demonstrate that Google’s excuse is just that, an excuse that isn’t really true. In doing so, they created a site called Focus on the User that includes bookmarklets for Safari, Chrome and Firefox that expands Google search to include other social networks.

The video above gives background to all this and shows how its done.

ZDNet explains things further:

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 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, 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…

…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+.

To be clear: the tool not only reorders the search engine results, but also the results of the promotional Google+ boxes on the right side of the results, as well as the autocomplete results that feature Google+ accounts when you type into the search box. In Google language these three are known as: People & Pages results, Google+ Sitelinks, and Google+ Suggestions In Autocomplete.

Focus on the User can be found here. The “Don’t be Evil” Bookmarklet is available on the site’s home page.