Developers from Facebook, Twitter and MySpace have formed an opposition group to Google's new “Search Plus Your World” algorithm that favours Google+ content.
The “Focus on the user” campaign counters Google's argument that it doesn't surface results from its competitors due to the fact that it does not have access to the necessary APIs. The engineers behind the initiative have developed a proof of concept that they say “shows what is possible with social content in Google's results”.
Users can now add a special bookmarklet to their browsers (Chrome, Firefox or Safari), which, when clicked, alters the search results to include all relevant social content from all platforms.
The developers explain: “We 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.”
Googling Google
In response to questions about whether Google requires special agreements with its competitors to surface the results, the team of developers say: “The bookmarklet never accesses any server or API outside of google.com. The information has already been indexed and ranked by Google.”
The developers offer up numerous examples to prove their point, and also illustrate it in a walkthrough video.
“When Google's engineers are allowed to focus purely on relevancy, they get it right. So that's what our 'bookmarklet' does,” says the team.
“It looks at the three places where Google only shows Google+ results and then automatically googles Google to see if Google finds a result more relevant than Google+.”
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