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Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace To Google: Don't Be Evil

Posted by Soulskill on 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."

2 of 208 comments (clear)

  1. Don't Be Evil by jakrmaster · · Score: 1, Troll
    The video of the proof of concept looks actually awesome, and much better than how Google is doing it now. It's also much better for the user since it pulls the content from all social networks and other relevant sites. Interestingly, they're using Google's own search engine to do this:

    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+.

    In my opinion this demonstrates perfectly that it's entirely possible for Google. It's just that they don't want to do it - they want more control for themselves and more information about users for advertising and marketing. Social networking would be awesome source of data for Google and they must be crying blood that they didn't get it before Facebook and Twitter surfaced. If they had their own social network they would get all that. But by far Google+ is an epic failure.

    1. Re:Don't Be Evil by jakrmaster · · Score: 0, Troll

      How does Facebook prevent Google from indexing it? It doesn't - in fact, you can find tons of people, pages and other parts of Facebook on Google. Hell, if you want API access there's Open Graph. If you want to do large scale scraping on Facebook you can also contact then. Judging by Facebook's robot.txt, Google has this permission (and so does several other search engines).