Social networks such as Twitter and Facebook have been a bit upset over Google’s recent changes to their social search product. If you’re not familiar with the changes, basically it integrates Google Plus results into your normal, every day search.
Now, users can turn off the function, but you still get results from their social network such as people to circle and that kind of thing. It seems that Twitter, Facebook, and Myspace, have actually teamed up and created ‘Focus on the User’ which, using a bookmarklet, integrates Facebook and Twitter into the results.
“The output of Focus on the User is the Don’t Be Evil bookmarklet, which taps Google’s own ranking of its organic search results to determine what social content should appear in Google+ results–such as results from Facebook, Twitter and other sources–instead of just the Google+ posts, photos and brand pages that currently surface in Search, plus your world.”
“The tool only accesses data already indexed and ranked in Google.com (via Google’s rich snippets tool), challenging Google’s assertion that it required a deal with Facebook, Twitter and others to use their data in Search, plus your world. “
It’ll be interesting to see how Google takes this and what they will have to say in return. Frankly, it does bring some nice added functionality to the changes in search. Thing is though, Twitter decided to not renew their deal with the tech giant, and Facebook didn’t want anything to do with social search in the first place.
Don’t be evil? You can check out focus on the user here.
Do you think the social networks have a point here?