To be clear: the tool not only reorders the search engine results, but also the results of the promotional Google+ boxes on the right side of the results, as well as the autocomplete results that feature Google+ accounts when you type into the search box. In Google language these three are known as: People & Pages results, Google+ Sitelinks, and Google+ Suggestions In Autocomplete.
Here's the Focus on the User's official description:
How much better would social search be if Google surfaced results from all across the web? The results speak for themselves. We created a tool that uses Google's own relevance measure—the ranking of their organic search results—to determine what social content should appear in the areas where Google+ results are currently hardcoded. All of the information in this demo comes from Google itself, and all of the ranking decisions are made by Google's own algorithms. No other services or APIs are accessed.
The last part is key: Google argues that it would include results from Facebook and Twitter if it was given access to all the data from the social networks. Last week,
Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt said: "The core question is, 'Would we be willing to [include Facebook and Twitter], and the answer is, 'We'll be happy to talk to them about it'."
As you can see in the video above, this little coding project clearly shows that Google doesn't really need the data it is asking for in order to make SPYW work fairly. The bookmarklet never accesses any server or API outside of google.com. The information being provided has already been indexed and ranked by Google.
The bookmarklet even shows profile pictures, which are pulled directly from Google. The tool enters the address of the new social result into Google's
Rich Snippets Testing Tool and uses the information that Google provides. In other words, Google is only showing images for Google+ results, even though it has images from many other services.
By the way, the tool might not work for you because SPYW hasn't been rolled out to everyone yet. Google has pushed out the new social features on google.com to a percentage of U.S. users. If you don't see any of the Google+ social results on Google yet, you do not have the feature yet, so you can't use the "don't be evil" tool.
The group has released the code as open source in the hopes that someone will turn the bookmarklet into a browser extension so that you don't have to click it every time you visit google.com. You can view the JavaScript code yourself over at focusontheuser.org/dontbeevil/script.js. Whether or not it gets turned into an extension doesn't really matter though. The point Facebook and its partners are trying to make here is that Google is not being truthful, nor is it doing what's best for the user, and it's simply being evil.
Google is trying to use SPYW as a bargaining chip. I'm sure the search giant would love to have more data from the aforementioned companies, especially your Facebook social graph (your Friends Lists, who your friends are friends with, and so on), which is what the
last battle between Facebook and Google was about. Facebook and friends are fighting back.
Emil Protalinski has covered the tech industry for five years for multiple publications.
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