And even once these services open up more: At what point would you set the threshold for inclusion of $social_network in the list? I certainly would not want a list of various social network batches under every search result.
Only list the ones the user is active in? Sure. But how do you determine "active"? Networks in which the user posts a lot? In which he reads a lot of other users content (how would Google find out about that?)?
The integration as it is currently made for G+ basically only works because Google has all that G+ profile data and for it to work as well with other networks, I'd say, Google needs specialized access to it.
Or to be more cynical: So twitter wants to have their accounts integrated into the search results of a search engine? Easy: Just create a search engine too and have all of Google's user switch over.
Setting aside how absurd I find that notion to be, it seems to me that the whole G+ project is a response to that threat, and it's a response that says "I can duplicate your functionality a lot easier than you can duplicate mine, and it adds a lot more value to my major service to duplicate your functionality, than it adds to your major service to duplicate mine."
It also seems like a play to get access to Twitter and FB data. Google uses free data on the open web. If you don't allow them to index your data for free, why would you expect them to include them in their search results?
As a user, I want Twitter and FB to give Google all of their data, and I want Google to run all of that data through their algorithms and give me the results that are the best, regardless of what service it's on. From where I sit, it doesn't seem like Google is the player that's in the way of that happening.
> why would you expect them to include them in their search
> results?
This tool demonstrates that Google is already accessing and indexing the data it says it needs to improve its search results. This isn't rhetoric; it's code.
Google has access to the same information about other social profiles that it does about its own profiles, as the tool on the site demonstrates.
If Focus on the User really doesn't want to be "evil" and you want to "focus on the user" then the plugin needs to be changed. The edits the plugin makes are better, but it just looks like Facebook/Twitter are just making sure they get their websites mentioned. It appears they are not focused on the user, but focused on how it will help them.
Here are some major suggestions:
1. If someone searches for cars in Google, 95% of the time they are looking to either research cars, buy a car, or the movie Cars. First of all do you honestly feel that Ferrari's facebook or google+ page is more relevant/useful than the websites of CarsDirect, Edmunds, or MotorTrend? The Google+/Facebook pages are more prominent than these websites. That makes zero sense. I don't know if you can do this, but if possible the "People and Pages" section should be removed. If not, see #2.
2. Why would the first result be Ferrari's facebook page in this search over Ferrari's own web site?
3. The Autosuggestion thing should work the same way as above. When I search for Matt Cutts I am not looking for either his Facebook or his Google Plus page, the most relevant result would be mattcutts.com, no? Or just remove the autosuggestion thing period. Assuming that I want to go see Matt Cutts Facebook profile over his Google+ profile is silly.
4. Make it so that you can actually remove Google+ results period. When I search for NFC Championship Game I don't care to see that MG Siegler went to that game. Nor would I want to see that on facebook either. It just ideally would be removed.
So Google has their own algorithms to, say, connect Yehuda Katz with a search query for "ruby". This means that the plugin only finds ruby people who also have a G+ profile and then adds links to other services too.
Now for this to be really useful, it should find people even if they don't have a G+ profile and that is what I wonder whether it's even possible by just crawling the web to the extent allowed by the various services.
Adding other Social Networking links to already determined Google+ profiles is not interesting. Finding people on Twitter related to a search term regardless of whether they have a G+ profile or not is the interesting part.
Until last Summer, Twitter had a contract with Google to give the latter its firehose stream, with all its tweets in real time. AFAIK, it was Twitter that decided not to renew that contract, evidently because they thought they could monetize that information better without Google. But now, apparently, they want their cake and eat it too...
Does it demonstrate that? It's more likely that those profiles just show up because of the normal page rank algorithm (eg Jamie Oliver's twitter account ranks highly because so many people link to it). It is a reasonable proxy for popularity for popular people, at least, though there's probably too much noise before you get too far down the long tail. But it isn't the same thing that the OP was talking about.
I actually think it would be cool if google took the more Open Social approach by taking the sites I list in my profile as mine, looked at my friends and frequency of posting where available (more twitter than facebook), and then biased my results to favor my preferred networks. I don't know if it would end up with great results, but it could be an interesting separate tool, perhaps.
google can do personal search on g+ because they maintain the permissions database for g+ content and won't show private stuff to the wrong people. how do they do that for facebook?
This whole issue feels artificial and exaggerated: social profiles? seriously?! that is the least of any user's concerns. I think Twitter/Facebook and whomever should focus on their own products and not resort to these sorts of PR stunts.
They want to get to Facebook? They type "facebook" into Google and click the first link. They believe that Google is how you access the Internet, clinging onto the old AOL frontpage mentality of portals and site discovery. That's why search ranking matters so much.
Facebook/Twitter aren't the real losers here though. They will survive. The problem is that Google is pushing their results to their average content on Google+ while tossing thousands of smaller content websites aside. Don't expect that to decrease. It is too easy for them to grow profits by pushing their own content. Whether they start other content companies or buy them, this is their growth.
This also shows why we need a strong alternative to Google Search. I hope Bing hooks up with Twitter, Facebook and other services like Foursquare to make a better social search. They have tried too long to beat Google at its own game.
It's my understanding that search results are unchanged - is this wrong? I thought the social box on the side was just something that came up in addition to the natural search results.
Then I did another search for NFC Championship game - Again, MG Siegler #5 in the results. Apparently he made a comment that he was going to the game. So this guy who is not associated with football in any way who wrote a 10 word fragment on his wall showed up above the following results...
http://www.nfl.com/news/story/09000d5d82622cb4/article/nfc-c...
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/us/text-message-service-he...
http://blog.sfgate.com/49ers/2012/01/23/photos-from-the-nfc-...
http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1035221-nfc-championship-...
http://espn.go.com/blog/nflnation/post/_/id/52524/page/count...
This was definitely not happening one month ago.
For the record, Mark Zuckerberg can make his profile not visible to search engines if he so wanted: http://support.google.com/plus/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...
And less seriously: http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/15/google-ad-on-facebook-is-ba... (Google+ Ad banned)
if (/MSIE (\d+\.\d+);/.test(navigator.userAgent)) { alert( "Unfortunately, this tool does not currently work in Internet Explorer. " + "Please try another browser such as Firefox, Chrome, or Safari."); return; }
That's not very nice. Surely this can be made to work for at least IE9 :)
I think the idea is that if google ranks someone's twitter profile first in the organic results, why not show it in that social box? There is something of a point here.
(although for many of the example searches there are several results before any social networking results...so it would seem focusing on the user would have financial and wikipedia results for AT&T before their twitter account is listed. And then we're just back to no elevated results. But social networking is special now, I guess?)
This would be a lot more compelling if they would drop the attempt at a "grassroots" "just bringing up the issues for discussion" feel. As it is, it comes off more as that "fair search" group that was really pretty much just expedia and bing. It seems at least plausible that this actually came from some engineers hanging out, discussing this, and writing some code, and if someone had just blogged about it and put it up on github, I think it would be getting a better response (if only to prove the point). Instead, I feel like the page is just trying to manipulate me. It feels like marketing.
Before the recent changes, "Jamie Oliver" simply didn't show up when searching for "cooking", I expect. It didn't matter if his twitter or G+ page were the first result for him, because they were probably on page 800 of the search results.
Now, with the additional info it has via G+, Google is featuring him and some other people alongside the normal results when you query for Google.
Where Twitter falls in the query for "Jamie Oliver" doesn't seem particularly relevant to that. I understand the thinking, but I don't think it makes sense to say that because Jamie Oliver is a top G+ result for "Cooking", and Twitter is the top result for "Jamie Oliver", then Jamie Oliver's Twitter must be the top social result for "cooking".
The OP is assuming that search results are somehow transitive in nature, and I'm don't think they should be just taking that for granted.
Should Google add links to the other services in those G+ listings coming up alongside the results alongside the cooking SRP? Maybe. But that seems like a UX/business question, not one that you can answer quantitatively.
What's next, giveusersbetterads.org by "several Google employees" to convince Facebook they should allow Google Adsense in Facebook apps?
It seems to be working.
[1] http://marshallk.com/google-pluss-real-goal-is-not-to-kill-f...
This I think is what Google is doing. The more Facebook opens up, the better for them. And it's working fine, I guess. Since when users switched to the timeline format, some of them had their privacy set to public.
