Image by Getty Images via @daylife
In my article, "Google's Brilliant New Weapon To Fight Facebook," I described Google’s new weapon “Search 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 runs in a Web browser and temporarily enables additional functionality. A bookmarklet is a JavaScript stored as a hyperlink on a Web page.
The tool is available from a new website, Focus on the User. This tool is not claimed to be an official product of Facebook, Twitter or MySpace.
Don’t Be Evil is an interesting tool, but it is hard to see the masses adopting it unless Facebook and Twitter officially get behind it.
In my previous article I addressed the issue of antitrust concerns. I contended that there would be none if Google had its way. Google seems to claim that it is willing to consider including the content from competitors but competitors do not allow Google to do so.
No matter how one looks at it, this is a brilliant strategy. This puts Facebook and Twitter between a rock and a hard place. If they allow their content to be included in Google, Google siphons advertising revenue from their content. If they do not allow Google to search their content, there is no antitrust case.
The Google strategy may in part be directed at Amazon.com (AMZN) for the purpose of bringing back some of the traffic from consumers looking for retail items. Recently, Google has lost traffic to Amazon and Siri from Apple (AAPL).
About Me: I am an engineer and nuclear physicist by background, have founded two Inc. 500 fastest growing companies and have been involved in over 50 entrepreneurial ventures. I am the chief investment officer at The Arora Report which publishes four newsletters to help investors profit from change. Please feel free to write me at Nigam@TheAroraReport.com.
Full disclosure: I am long Apple from an average of $131. I took profits on 50% of the position at an average price of $360. Subscribers to ZYX Buy Change Alert may have a similar position and may have taken similar actions.
