Unless you’ve been living in a cave you’ll know Google launched it’s (latest) fledgling social network Google + late last year. It received mixed reactions and to begin with was mostly populated with SEOs and people from the tech industry. That has changed now and plus is getting more main stream traction. Cue Google Search, plus Your World:
Search Plus Your World is an amalgamation of normal organic SERPs and the social web either from or influenced by your connections on Google+. Sounds great, doesn’t it? Well the problem is Google is more or less ignoring anything from the social web outside of Google+ (most of the social web then…).
It’s Google’s sand pit and they seem reluctant to let others play in it. This is, rightly so, making some of the other big players on the social web a little annoyed.
To combat this engineers from Facebook, Twitter, Myspace and many others have created a tool with the rather tongue in cheek name ‘Dont be Evil’. Don’t be Evil is one of Google’s founding principles and one it still claims to stand by today.
Focus on the user
The website focus on the user have created a tool to combat Google’s one-sided view of the social web presented by Google + search your world.
The tool is a bookmarklet for your browser that detects 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 ‘Don’t be Evil’ 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 one’s 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+.
Focusontheuser.com have a short video describing the tool:
Examples from the focus on the user site:
The “People and Pages” Results Box
When you search for generic terms like “movies”, “music”, “photography”, “programming”, “cars”, “cooking”, “science”—or even companies like “twitter” or “google”—Google shows Google+ results at the top of the page, even if you don’t have a Google+ account. Often these results are irrelevant for users, such as when Google links to Mark Zuckerberg’s empty Google+ profile on a search for “facebook”. Mouse over the image below to see the results that Google deems most relevant.
Social Web According to Google + Search Your World
Results from the wider social web
We’ve just started to use the don’t be evil tool now so we’ll let you know what we think. Search plus your world seems to trigger more on Google.com than Google.co.uk at the moment. In the mean time install it yourself and let us know what you think. The guys over at Search Engine Land have an article about this too.
Image credits go to focus on the user, Meme Generator and bhatt.
