Engineers of popular networking sites Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace released a browser bookmarklet called “Don’t Be Evil,” in response to Google’s new “Search Plus Your World” feature.
Google’s “Search Plus Your World” feature is supposed to integrate social network data into search results, but it only pulls data from Google+ and Picasa at the moment.
Twitter criticized changes, saying they artificially inflate Google+ above its natural position if measured by popularity around the web. Moreover, the changes will result in finding the most relevant information difficult.
External commentators have also accused Google of betraying its original aims – to give the broadest view of the most popular links on the web – in order to boost Google+ artificially.
The new bookmarklet, “Don’t Be Evil” (at jab at Google’s informal motto), alters Google search results to make them more like they were before “Search Plus Your World” was launched.
Don’t Be Evil bookmarklet and other resources can be found at FocusOnTheUser.org. To install, click the button that says “Try a More Relevant Google.” Then, drag the “don’t be evil” button into the browser bar of Firefox or Safari. Chrome users can get the extension over at http://www.focusontheuser.org/extensions.php.
While Google insisted that Facebook and Twitter did not allow sufficient access to their sites for Google to be able to integrate results from them into its search, and that Google+ was not being favoured, search engine analyst Danny Sullivan shows that the new “Don’t be evil” tool offers what seems objectively a far more accurate reflection of the popularity of different pages on the web.
The code was created by Blake Ross, director of product at Facebook, with help from Twitter and MySpace.
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