In my article, ‘œGoogle’s Brilliant New Weapon To Fight Facebook,’ I described Google’s new weapon ‘œSearch plus Your World’.
Search plus Your World changed Google’s ranking in its search results. Google started emphasizing results from Google+ social network at the expense of Facebook and Twitter.
Now a few engineers from Facebook led by Blake Ross, Facebook’s product director and co-founder of Firefox, along with engineers from Twitter and MySpace, are responding with a new tool called ‘˜Don’t Be Evil.’ The name Don’t Be Evil is a fairly deliberate dig at Google’s tag line.
The engineers asked how much better social search would be if Google surfaced results from all across the Web. They 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.
According to the developers, this is how the tool works:
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 tool is offered as a bookmarklet, which is a small bit of code that run…Read more at Forbes.
