'Don't Be Evil': Facebook's Blake Ross Fights Back Against Google Social Search Exclusion

By Liz Gannes, via Facebook's Blake Ross Fights Back Against Google Social Search Exclusion on AllThingsD

A new plugin adds content from competitors like Facebook and Twitter into Google's new social search results. And it was built by engineers from those competitors.

Google's recent move to promote its own social network on its search engine wasn't popular with its competitors. Now some engineers from Facebook and other social media sites are fighting back. They're out to prove that Google can do better -- using Google's own algorithms.

Nerd fight!

A weekend coding effort, led by Facebook rabble-rouser Blake Ross, gave birth to a browser bookmarklet called "don't be evil" that rewrites Google's personalized search results to include content from other social networks. (Ross's official title is Director of Product, and he was previously a co-founder of Firefox.)

Ross said engineers from Twitter and Myspace also helped out with the bookmarklet, but he didn't name them. The group launched a Web site today, at focusontheuser.org.

This gets slightly complicated, but you can install the bookmarklet yourself in Chrome, Firefox and Safari, or watch a video about how it works. After you do a normal Google search with personalized results turned on, you can click on the bookmarklet to get an updated version of the results that includes links to Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace, Quora, Tumblr, Foursquare, CrunchBase, FriendFeed, Stack Overflow, GitHub and Google+.

I ran into a bunch of hiccups when I tried the bookmarklet out in Chrome, but it worked pretty smoothly in Firefox.

Here's the background: A couple of weeks ago, when it launched "Search plus Your World" by default for English-language users, Google said that other social networks like Facebook and Twitter don't let it crawl deeply enough to provide “secure and consistent access” to their users' private content. So, SPYW could only include Google+ content.

That's a bit of a ruse, because there's lots of public content from social networks that Google already indexes. It's not hard to find Twitter handles and LinkedIn profiles in Google search results. When SPYW launched, Twitter loudly called foul, and people at Facebook complained more quietly.

The thing is, SPYW doesn't just give preference to private Google+ content in personalized search results. It also actively promotes Google+ profiles and other public content in various locations throughout the search page.

Google+ profiles-- but not content from any other social network-- now show up in a new "People and Pages" box that sometimes appears in place of ads on the right side of Google’s search-results page, as a type-ahead suggested query within the search box, and interspersed high up in search results for many brands.

Ross and his buddies used Google's own organic search results and "Rich Snippets" tool to find the social network content that Google already indexes and ranks normally. The bookmarklet then integrates those diverse results into places where Google+ content is exclusively promoted.

This was an independent and unofficial effort, but Facebook is hardly disavowing it. In fact, a Facebook spokesman praised Ross’s voice-over talent (that's him speaking in the video) in an email to AllThingsD.

While this feistiness makes for a fun story, the moral high ground might be a dangerous spot for Ross to claim.

Facebook notoriously hoards its members' friend graphs and user emails, doling out access only to partners that it doesn’t see as direct competitors. Users who wish to remove and transport their data to another service are stifled at every turn.

Further, Facebook limits access to search engines, having required Microsoft's Bing to sign a deal to access content that’s mostly public already. And it's not like the company provides its own democratic search engine to compete with Google.

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Comments

[Ollie Byrd]

09:39 AM on 01/24/2012

Hilarious Facebook Cartoon:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/pajaroentertainmentltd/facebook-friendship-31ii

[mhsden]

06:11 AM on 01/24/2012

Social networks are just another way for big brother to watch what your up to.

[Juicyhil]

05:41 AM on 01/24/2012

And now there should come a bookmarklet to exclude all that crap from social networks. Where is the time that we got a nice clear result page?

[listgirl3]

11:29 PM on 01/23/2012

The intent of the tools aren't evil. Its what is done with them. No one can completely control someone else's human nature, so why do we keep poking it with a stick...?

[Learical]

11:18 PM on 01/23/2012

Facebook, Twitter, all so-called 'social networks' are contributing to a lot of social ills, which include hacking, bullying, id theft, etc. When will the general public figure that out??

[steves1709]

10:14 PM on 01/23/2012

People still use FB?

[listgirl3]

11:26 PM on 01/23/2012

Hahaha!! Thank you! ;)

[groucho42]

04:51 PM on 01/23/2012

It's fun to read about, but both Facebook and Google are evil so it's not something I'll get involved with or care about.

[WayoftheDodo]

04:26 PM on 01/23/2012

Very interesting. I'm curious to see how many people will download it and actively use it. I'm even more interested to see how Google reacts to it, especially when they claim to provide the most relevant results.

[jsarets]

04:07 PM on 01/23/2012

There's nothing preventing Facebook and Twitter from offering their own search engines.

Google's traditional model of searching the web is running into a brick wall as the web evolves from a document platform to an application platform. Increasingly, the URL represents a request for dynamically-generated content from a private database rather than a static document on a public web server. The web is becoming more and more hostile to crawler-based search engines.

If dynamic web services like Facebook and Twitter want to expose their content to search queries which can operate over their private data stores and understand application-specific semantics including relationship models and privacy controls, then they need to implement that search functionality themselves, because this goes way beyond the capabilities of a generic web crawler.

The web doesn't follow the idealistic model of HTTP. It doesn't guarantee that the same request will return the same response regardless of state (including user account). It also doesn't guarantee that GET requests have no side-effects. For example, Google's well-meaning Web Accelerator was a disaster because many web applications were using GET where they should have used POST, and so when Google tried to cache GET requests, it was duplicating form submissions and such.

Google relies on the web as it was supposed to be. There's only so much they can do about web applications which don't implement RESTful HTTP services. These assumptions are what allows Google to crawl the web without understanding particular web services.

[Jam75]

03:55 PM on 01/23/2012

"To sum it up briefly, "a scammer whines about getting scammed."

[EcnelisDoogod]

03:50 PM on 01/23/2012

There seems to be a concerted effort to "trash" Google at every opportunity. All the anti-trust concerns come from the competitors while Google's users have to defend them.

Microsoft and at&t did some pretty rotten things to their customers. What has Google done to deserve this?

[CharlesFarls]

08:45 PM on 01/23/2012

You are 100% correct there. Others see it though so don't think you are alone.

[BatsShadow]

03:36 PM on 01/23/2012

This would matter at all if anyone actually liked "Search Plus Your World." It horribly clutters the search results and everyone I know has turned it off already.

[JWerner]

02:43 PM on 01/23/2012

Umm, it's Google+. Google has every right to promote its own social network on the search page. Of course, Facebook and Twitter have the right to not like it (they are the competition, after all). . .but to dislike it because Google has the temerity, the unmitigated GALL to promote its own services on its website(s)? That's just silly.

[Stephen Wierman]

07:58 AM on 01/24/2012

No actually they don't. Google being a search engin company used to pride itself on being the most comprehensive search with the most revelent results on top. They are now giving themselves a free add on the right of the search to promote themselves over other more revelent results. If they were calling it an ad like they are required with all other ads on google than this would be fine.