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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."
..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.
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.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
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
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.
Pot, kettle, Kettle, pot.
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.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
new account, same anti-google? 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.
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?!?
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.
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.
Facebook telling someone how not to be evil? /. needs a comedy section. Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
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.
Oh hai, DCTech. New account for a new story you posted, right? Well, here's a quick summary of why Facebook and MySpace are full of crap, and Twitter is irrelevant:
* There's the standard complaint that links on top of the search results are an unfair promotion of Google's own data. Well, no shit sherlock. It's their own site, and they can show their own links whereever the hell they want. It's marked as not part of the search results, so I don't see how this could possibly be read as cooking the results. Unless, of course, you're Facebook and are trying to poison the debate.
* The focusontheuser.org page is also misleading in what it calls "on top of the search results". In the video, they clicked on the G+ link that specifically says "Here are the G+ results for your search", not on the general search results. Then they complain they get taken to the G+ page. I'm confused on how that was a surprise.
Essentially, what this is is a general bitch session by Facebook that Google shows Google products in the areas that are dedicated to Google products. Really? That's a problem? If Facebook is unhappy about how Google displays Facebook results, I have a suggestion for them: create your own search engine. Make it exactly as platform agnostic as it was shown on the focusontheuser.org site. Then go talk about Google doesn't offer the best possible search engine. In the meantime, this comes across as nothing but a giant astroturfing campaign by Facebook to force Google to show Facebook and Twitter results in an area that Google has set aside for its own products.
That said, there are some interesting ideas in there on how Google can improve its search:
* default opt-out for showing my G+ info. I know when to look for it, thanks.
* In the left sidebar, include a social network section. Filter specifically on known social networks. Have it even be customizable to only show results from a user-defined list of social networks.
But that's it. There's absolutely no need to have FB and Twitter results show up in the right side-bar, which is explicitly dedicated to Google product results. Not unless you want to essentially force Google to advertise Facebook and Twitter results for free.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
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".
So, what, you want to restrict how discoverable information is to the recipients after you've actively shared the infromation with them?
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?
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();