Earlier this month, I wrote about Search plus Your World, Google’s new search feature that allows users to get more social web results. In this new feature, the search giant delivers Google+ items specifically shared with the user, along with organic search results. And while this is indeed a pretty useful capability because it allows people to view social AND web results, the release of Search plus Your World raised eyebrows in the SEO and social media community mainly because the “social” results produced by the new feature only included pages from Google+. Twitter even publicly reacted to this move and expressed their concern over the whole issue.
Today though, Twitter, (with Facebook, MySpace and other unnamed social network companies) fight back. Over the weekend, Blake Ross, Facebook’s Director of Product along with other engineers from MySpace and Twitter developed a browser tool called “Don’t be evil.”
How it works
The Don’t be evil tool serves as a bookmarklet that transforms Google’s Search plus Your World results to include pages from other social networks. For instance, when your search for “music” on Google, you would still get organic search results; however, on the left part of the SERP, you’ll see a box suggesting the Google+ Pages of Britney Spears, Snoop Dogg, and other artists. When you click on the Don’t be evil bookmarklet, you’ll see a modified version of these results. You’ll still see the box suggesting Britney Spears and Snoop Dogg, but instead of their Google+ profile, the search results will display their Twitter accounts. Similarly, when you search for Mark Zuckerberg on regular Google, it’ll suggest his Google+ page which has been empty for months. Don’t be evil on the other hand, suggests Zuck’s Facebook page instead, which you’ll have to admit, makes more sense.
So how does the Don’t be evil tool determine which social network result to display? Simple. It asks Google. According to their website:
If Google decides that it’s relevant to surface Google+ page as a result in any of the areas where Google+ content is hardcoded, the tool searches Google for the name of the Google+ page. Then, the tool identifies the social profiles within the first ten pages of Google results (top 100 results). The ones Google ranks highest — whether they are from Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Quora, Tumblr, Foursquare, Crunchbase, FriendFeed, Stack Overflow, Github or Google+ — replace the previous results that could only be from Google+.
This is the part that gets a little technical, so you may want to view their video walkthrough to really see how the bookmarklet works.
Why “Don’t be evil?”
“Don’t be evil,” according to Google, is the cornerstone of their Code of Conduct. It’s basically about providing users with “unbiased access to information, focusing on their needs and giving them the best products and services.” Search plus Your World appears to deviate from this philosophy since it only displays social search results from Google’s own social network—results that may not be the most relevant or useful to people. Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and all those behind the Don’t be evil tool want to shed light on this particular issue, hence the name.
Image credit: http://www.focusontheuser.org/