Privacy advocates have joined the chorus of opposition to Google's new “Search Plus Your World” or “Search Plus” algorithm.
The Electronic Privacy Information Centre (EPIC) has said it is considering filing a letter of complaint with the US Federal Trade Commission, arguing that the new search features, which foreground social content from Google+, violate privacy and raise anti-trust concerns.
EPIC has previously successfully filed complaints against Google and Facebook with the FTC, resulting in both parties being required to submit audits on their privacy practices at regular intervals.
According to EPIC: “Although data from a user's Google+ contacts is not displayed publicly, Google's changes make the personal data of users more accessible. Users can opt out of seeing personalised search results, but cannot opt out of having their information found through Google search.”
The new personal search feature incorporates content posted to Google+ and the public Web, such as photos, comments and news.
While Google has been fine-tuning its search algorithms for years, some critics say the search giant is now taking a step too far and using its dominance to push users to its own new social platform Google+.
Thin argument?
EPIC says: “Google's changes come at a time when the company is facing increased scrutiny over whether it distorts search results by giving preference to its own content.
“Recently, the Senate held a hearing on Google's use of its dominance in the search market to suppress competition, and EPIC urged the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Google's use of YouTube search rankings to give preferential treatment to its own video content over non-Google content.”
New media lawyer, Paul Jacobson, says he doesn't agree with EPIC's claims.
“Google+ has fairly granular sharing options and users can choose whether to share their content publicly, with limited groups of people, or keep it private. Google+ users have had the ability to search across Google+ for posts that are visible to them in Google+ based on whether the posts were made public or are in the circles the content was shared with,” notes Jacobson.
“The new functionality adds those posts to Google's main search results but the visibility controls remain in place so content shared publicly remains public and limited shares remain limited.”
Jacobson argues that, while the addition of Google+ content directly to the main Google search index notionally exposes content to a broader audience, “this is a pretty thin argument”.
“A public post is public and users are under no illusions that they are otherwise. As long as Google respects users' choices to share with limited groups of people or keep content private, I think EPIC is trying to make noise about a fairly minor issue.
“People forget that Google+ wasn't launched as a standalone social network,” says Jacobson.
“From the outset, Google's intention was to create a strong social component for all of its services, and to bring social into everything. As the name suggests, it's Google plus more social.”
Jacobson says Google can't be said to be a real monopoly. “Sure it's the biggest search engine, but that's only because it's good at search. There are alternatives to all of the services offered by Google so there is always the option of just clicking away.”
Taunting Twitter
The LA Times quotes EPIC's executive director Marc Rotenberg saying: "Google is an entrenched player trying to fight off its challenger, Facebook, by using its market dominance in a separate sector. I think that should trouble people."
While Facebook has so far declined to comment on the issue, Twitter has been vocal about its concerns.
Twitter's general counsel, Alexander Macgillivray, has posted on Twitter evidence for why the micro-blog is arguing that the new search is skewing results rather than providing the most relevant results.
In the example, a search for “@wwe” shows five Google+ results prominently on the page, with the actual link to the @wwe Twitter account much further down. However, it is worth noting that Google Search does not process symbols such as '@' so it automatically just searches for 'wwe'.
As such, the example used by Macgillivray only shows that Google does not include competitors in its Google+ People and Pages sidebar that now appears in personalised searches.
Open to sharing
In response to Twitter's tirade, Google posted on Google+ that it was surprised by Twitter's reaction to its announcement, adding that it was Twitter that declined to renew its real-time search agreement with the search giant.
Google fellow Amit Singhal and Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt have, however, both said Google is open to talks with other social networks about including their content.
Google said in a press statement: “Google does not have access to fully crawl the content on some sites, so it's not possible for us to surface all that information.
“Ushering in the new era of social and private data search will take close cooperation, and we hope other sites participate so we can provide the best possible experience for our users.”
TechCrunch's Josh Constine argues that the real issue at hand is not privacy or primary search results. It is rather the fact that Google already has access to enough public data to surface its competitors in the People and Pages results, but it is choosing not to.
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