Slashdot Mirror
Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace To Google: Don't Be Evil
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."
Ya I was thinking the same thing. I read about some sort of deal between twitter and Google to use tweets in their search results but it fell through. So why is twitter bitching about it now? Google is running a business folks and they've done nothing wrong, by deciding to allow posts from their Google plus into the results.
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.
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.
Dilbert RSS feed