7 ms·

Google: Focus on the User

188 points by blakeross 15y ago

Engineers at Twitter, Facebook and MySpace got together to demonstrate that Google has all the information it needs to serve more relevant results to users—if it's willing to surface results from other social networks beyond its own.

yanw 15y ago
I have no idea why would anyone feel entitled to any sort of placement in Google search results, they do not charge anyone for being indexed, and if you don't care for the results that is what the address bar on web browsers is for. This whole issue feels artificial and exaggerated: social profiles? seriously?! that is the least of any user's concerns. I think Twitter/Facebook and whomever should focus on their own products and not resort to these sorts of PR stunts.
- Pewpewarrows 15y ago
  Just to play devil's advocate here: for almost everyone in the non-techie general population that I've seen use the Internet, Google's search bar IS the address bar. They want to get to Facebook? They type "facebook" into Google and click the first link. They believe that Google is how you access the Internet, clinging onto the old AOL frontpage mentality of portals and site discovery. That's why search ranking matters so much.
  - SoftwareMaven 15y ago
    What's funny is that even people who never used AOL or Yahoo! (the early version :) still do the same thing, which I think says more about the cognitive load of browsers, domain names, bookmarks, etc, than it does about Google. Google makes all that load just disappear.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - yanw 15y ago
    Then educate those people and don't push for some nanny-state mandate by which even if the freedom to switch services is available one service must freely advertise all the others. Not to mention the hypocrisy of Facebook/Twitter blocking data from Google yet they are demanding to be featured anyway.
- fred_nada 15y ago
  Yes, but why did anyone feel entitled that their browser should be bundled with Windows? Or that Microsoft shouldn't be allowed to include their own software within their own software? Seems to me that is a sense of entitlement from non Microsoft companies. Yet, it was monopolistic abuse and wiped out Netscape. That is why we have antitrust/anticompetition laws. Facebook/Twitter aren't the real losers here though. They will survive. The problem is that Google is pushing their results to their average content on Google+ while tossing thousands of smaller content websites aside. Don't expect that to decrease. It is too easy for them to grow profits by pushing their own content. Whether they start other content companies or buy them, this is their growth.
  - yanw 15y ago
    Not that tired meme again. No, it's not the same as Windows+IE: in this case both products are free and both you do not own, it's just a website you visit basically. Also you are not trapped into them and Google didn't go about threatening OEMs.
    - fred_nada 15y ago
      You aren't familiar with antitrust laws. Because a company has a free product does not mean it can't be anticompetitive. Free means nothing. Example: If one company owned 90% of the media content in the world and gave it a way for free because they made money on ads does not mean they can't abuse their power. If you started your own website how would people find out about you? 90% of the search engines wouldn't show you. You couldn't advertise on 90% of magazines, websites or tv shows. And 90% of social networks wouldn't allow links going out of their site. And so on. This is an extreme example, but free means nothing. Who was trapped into using Windows? Why couldn't you buy another OS? Threatening OEMs? The MS abuse I was talking about was having to do with IE only. But Google is not innocent of strong-arming companies either. If Yelp didn't allow Google to use its reviews in Google Places, Yelp would be removed from the index entirely. http://searchengineland.com/yelp-google-told-us-its-our-way-or-the-highway-66417 http://searchengineland.com/yelp-google-told-us-its-our-way-...
      - 15y ago
OoTheNigerian 15y ago
Google Plus's Real Goal is Not to Kill Facebook (or twitter), but to Force (them) to Open [1] It seems to be working. [1] http://marshallk.com/google-pluss-real-goal-is-not-to-kill-facebook-but-to-force-it-to-open http://marshallk.com/google-pluss-real-goal-is-not-to-kill-f...
untog 15y ago
Not to sound too down on it, but.. "well, duh". It's not like Google forgot they were able to do this. They have made a business decision, and the site doesn't really tackle why they should change their minds.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
SoftwareMaven 15y ago
Antitrust issues occur when you use your dominance in one market to give you an unfair advantage in another. I think FB, Twitter,and MySpace are using this to advertise Google just might be doing that. The focused language on how the results are what Google would come up with naturally if they weren't forcing the "inappropriate" G+ results is a little over-the-top to be natural, IMO.
- j_s 15y ago
  I believe Facebook's position on use of competing technologies in Facebook apps is relevant: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2291336 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2291336 (Google Adsense banned from Apps) And less seriously: http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/15/google-ad-on-facebook-is-banned/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/15/google-ad-on-facebook-is-ba... (Google+ Ad banned)
pilif 15y ago
As long as Twitter (and Facebook even more so) don't allow Google to actually index them fully, I don't think that a service like the one outlined here would work very well. And even once these services open up more: At what point would you set the threshold for inclusion of $social_network in the list? I certainly would not want a list of various social network batches under every search result. Only list the ones the user is active in? Sure. But how do you determine "active"? Networks in which the user posts a lot? In which he reads a lot of other users content (how would Google find out about that?)? The integration as it is currently made for G+ basically only works because Google has all that G+ profile data and for it to work as well with other networks, I'd say, Google needs specialized access to it. Or to be more cynical: So twitter wants to have their accounts integrated into the search results of a search engine? Easy: Just create a search engine too and have all of Google's user switch over.
- blakeross 15y ago
  You don't have to guess how well such a service would work. It has been built and is available on the site. Google has access to the same information about other social profiles that it does about its own profiles, as the tool on the site demonstrates.
  - pilif 15y ago
    As I see it, the code that adds social networking links to people in the right side-bar (which is probably the most prominent feature of the bookmarklet) depends on the G+ profile being there. So Google has their own algorithms to, say, connect Yehuda Katz with a search query for "ruby". This means that the plugin only finds ruby people who also have a G+ profile and then adds links to other services too. Now for this to be really useful, it should find people even if they don't have a G+ profile and that is what I wonder whether it's even possible by just crawling the web to the extent allowed by the various services. Adding other Social Networking links to already determined Google+ profiles is not interesting. Finding people on Twitter related to a search term regardless of whether they have a G+ profile or not is the interesting part.
  - danmaz74 15y ago
whirlycott1 15y ago
I'd say "focus on the server," which seems to be overloaded and currently unavailable.
falling 15y ago
I find it quite funny to see the exact same phrases used to defend both Google and Apple when they do something unfair: “it's their [website|store], they are free to show what they want, you are not entitled to appear.”
0x006A 15y ago
a link to a facebook page of imdb? this is a joke right?
magicalist 15y ago
I think people are slightly missing the point here. This appears to be less about the google+ personal search results (searching over your friends pictures or whatever), and more about surfacing content on queries where you don't have personalized search results (e.g. that "movie" search that has hugh jackman's profile show up). I think the idea is that if google ranks someone's twitter profile first in the organic results, why not show it in that social box? There is something of a point here. (although for many of the example searches there are several results before any social networking results...so it would seem focusing on the user would have financial and wikipedia results for AT&T before their twitter account is listed. And then we're just back to no elevated results. But social networking is special now, I guess?) This would be a lot more compelling if they would drop the attempt at a "grassroots" "just bringing up the issues for discussion" feel. As it is, it comes off more as that "fair search" group that was really pretty much just expedia and bing. It seems at least plausible that this actually came from some engineers hanging out, discussing this, and writing some code, and if someone had just blogged about it and put it up on github, I think it would be getting a better response (if only to prove the point). Instead, I feel like the page is just trying to manipulate me. It feels like marketing.
nyellin 15y ago
Focus on the user? There are so many sharing links that I can't focus on the search results!
bryanh 15y ago
"Focus on our services (instead)."
j_baker 15y ago
Often these results are irrelevant for users, such as when Google links to Mark Zuckerberg's empty Google+ profile on a search for "facebook". For the record, Mark Zuckerberg can make his profile not visible to search engines if he so wanted: http://support.google.com/plus/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1151728&authuser=1 http://support.google.com/plus/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...
- xxbondsxx 15y ago
  That's not really the point though; Mark has made _zero_ posts on his Google+ account and updates his real Facebook account fairly frequently. One is a freshly-updated, lively social search result and the other is almost worthless.
- eddieplan9 15y ago
  This is equivalent of saying Google is giving Google+ pages preferential treatment unless a Google+ page explicitly states it does not want such a treatment. I won't say that is fair.
timruffles 15y ago
Focus on the... profits of our respective companies perhaps? If users want this 'feature' they'll switch to a search engine that supports it. In that case these companies are wasting time whining when they could be scooping up these users. Clearly they don't actually believe users care, so they're whining about it instead.
- tonfa 15y ago
  Doesn't bing already provide facebook integration?
chucknthem 15y ago
From the source code: http://www.focusontheuser.org/dontbeevil/script.js http://www.focusontheuser.org/dontbeevil/script.js if (/MSIE (\d+\.\d+);/.test(navigator.userAgent)) { alert( "Unfortunately, this tool does not currently work in Internet Explorer. " + "Please try another browser such as Firefox, Chrome, or Safari."); return; } That's not very nice. Surely this can be made to work for at least IE9 :)
- djblaze 15y ago
  I browsed the source briefly, and while they could get this to work on IE9, there is so much css/dom manipulation (which even ie9 is not great at) that it might slow down the browser enough to be seen as annoying.
movingahead 15y ago
This attempt proofs Google can do better in social results than what it is doing now. But, this also shows what great importance Google gives to Google+. They have made a conscious decision to compromise search quality to push users to Google+. A lot of us may believe that this won't work for Google+, but Google must think otherwise. Google has made their bet on using its most potent weapon - search to increase the user base of Google+. This also shows why we need a strong alternative to Google Search. I hope Bing hooks up with Twitter, Facebook and other services like Foursquare to make a better social search. They have tried too long to beat Google at its own game.
- ok_craig 15y ago
  "They have made a conscious decision to compromise search quality to push users to Google+" It's my understanding that search results are unchanged - is this wrong? I thought the social box on the side was just something that came up in addition to the natural search results.
  - blakeross 15y ago
    This is incorrect, as the second section on this page demonstrates: http://www.focusontheuser.org/examples.php http://www.focusontheuser.org/examples.php
    - ok_craig 15y ago
      Hm, that's not really what I mean. That's just providing additional information in the result. That additional info favors Google+, sure, but it's still not a rearrangement of the primary natural search results.
      - blakeross 15y ago
        The Google+ page is moved up within the natural search results.
      - ok_craig 15y ago
dannyr 15y ago
So in my opinion, my site provides better value for some keywords better than Yelp, Twitter or Facebook. So how can I get preferred placement on Google search results?
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
j_s 15y ago
In an ideal world, maybe... unfortunately the majority of the sentiment on this discussion disagreed with the author: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3497255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3497255 (Nice guys finish first. Eventually.) What's next, giveusersbetterads.org by "several Google employees" to convince Facebook they should allow Google Adsense in Facebook apps?
asadotzler 15y ago
Bookmarklets require too much effort. Get the Firefox restart-less add-on here: http://t.co/OFokUDSs http://t.co/OFokUDSs
tomkarlo 15y ago
While I think they make relevant points, the underlying logic of this whole video is questionable. Before the recent changes, "Jamie Oliver" simply didn't show up when searching for "cooking", I expect. It didn't matter if his twitter or G+ page were the first result for him, because they were probably on page 800 of the search results. Now, with the additional info it has via G+, Google is featuring him and some other people alongside the normal results when you query for Google. Where Twitter falls in the query for "Jamie Oliver" doesn't seem particularly relevant to that. I understand the thinking, but I don't think it makes sense to say that because Jamie Oliver is a top G+ result for "Cooking", and Twitter is the top result for "Jamie Oliver", then Jamie Oliver's Twitter must be the top social result for "cooking". The OP is assuming that search results are somehow transitive in nature, and I'm don't think they should be just taking that for granted. Should Google add links to the other services in those G+ listings coming up alongside the results alongside the cooking SRP? Maybe. But that seems like a UX/business question, not one that you can answer quantitatively.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
daintynews 15y ago
http://marshallk.com/google-pluss-real-goal-is-not-to-kill-facebook-but-to-force-it-to-open http://marshallk.com/google-pluss-real-goal-is-not-to-kill-f... This I think is what Google is doing. The more Facebook opens up, the better for them. And it's working fine, I guess. Since when users switched to the timeline format, some of them had their privacy set to public.

188 points by blakeross 15y ago

yanw 15y ago

I have no idea why would anyone feel entitled to any sort of placement in Google search results, they do not charge anyone for being indexed, and if you don't care for the results that is what the address bar on web browsers is for. This whole issue feels artificial and exaggerated: social profiles? seriously?! that is the least of any user's concerns. I think Twitter/Facebook and whomever should focus on their own products and not resort to these sorts of PR stunts.

Pewpewarrows 15y ago
Just to play devil's advocate here: for almost everyone in the non-techie general population that I've seen use the Internet, Google's search bar IS the address bar. They want to get to Facebook? They type "facebook" into Google and click the first link. They believe that Google is how you access the Internet, clinging onto the old AOL frontpage mentality of portals and site discovery. That's why search ranking matters so much.
- SoftwareMaven 15y ago
  What's funny is that even people who never used AOL or Yahoo! (the early version :) still do the same thing, which I think says more about the cognitive load of browsers, domain names, bookmarks, etc, than it does about Google. Google makes all that load just disappear.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- yanw 15y ago
  Then educate those people and don't push for some nanny-state mandate by which even if the freedom to switch services is available one service must freely advertise all the others. Not to mention the hypocrisy of Facebook/Twitter blocking data from Google yet they are demanding to be featured anyway.
fred_nada 15y ago
Yes, but why did anyone feel entitled that their browser should be bundled with Windows? Or that Microsoft shouldn't be allowed to include their own software within their own software? Seems to me that is a sense of entitlement from non Microsoft companies. Yet, it was monopolistic abuse and wiped out Netscape. That is why we have antitrust/anticompetition laws. Facebook/Twitter aren't the real losers here though. They will survive. The problem is that Google is pushing their results to their average content on Google+ while tossing thousands of smaller content websites aside. Don't expect that to decrease. It is too easy for them to grow profits by pushing their own content. Whether they start other content companies or buy them, this is their growth.
- yanw 15y ago
  Not that tired meme again. No, it's not the same as Windows+IE: in this case both products are free and both you do not own, it's just a website you visit basically. Also you are not trapped into them and Google didn't go about threatening OEMs.
  - fred_nada 15y ago
    You aren't familiar with antitrust laws. Because a company has a free product does not mean it can't be anticompetitive. Free means nothing. Example: If one company owned 90% of the media content in the world and gave it a way for free because they made money on ads does not mean they can't abuse their power. If you started your own website how would people find out about you? 90% of the search engines wouldn't show you. You couldn't advertise on 90% of magazines, websites or tv shows. And 90% of social networks wouldn't allow links going out of their site. And so on. This is an extreme example, but free means nothing. Who was trapped into using Windows? Why couldn't you buy another OS? Threatening OEMs? The MS abuse I was talking about was having to do with IE only. But Google is not innocent of strong-arming companies either. If Yelp didn't allow Google to use its reviews in Google Places, Yelp would be removed from the index entirely. http://searchengineland.com/yelp-google-told-us-its-our-way-or-the-highway-66417 http://searchengineland.com/yelp-google-told-us-its-our-way-...
    - 15y ago

OoTheNigerian 15y ago

Google Plus's Real Goal is Not to Kill Facebook (or twitter), but to Force (them) to Open [1] It seems to be working. [1] http://marshallk.com/google-pluss-real-goal-is-not-to-kill-facebook-but-to-force-it-to-open http://marshallk.com/google-pluss-real-goal-is-not-to-kill-f...

untog 15y ago

Not to sound too down on it, but.. "well, duh". It's not like Google forgot they were able to do this. They have made a business decision, and the site doesn't really tackle why they should change their minds.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

SoftwareMaven 15y ago

Antitrust issues occur when you use your dominance in one market to give you an unfair advantage in another. I think FB, Twitter,and MySpace are using this to advertise Google just might be doing that. The focused language on how the results are what Google would come up with naturally if they weren't forcing the "inappropriate" G+ results is a little over-the-top to be natural, IMO.

j_s 15y ago
I believe Facebook's position on use of competing technologies in Facebook apps is relevant: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2291336 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2291336 (Google Adsense banned from Apps) And less seriously: http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/15/google-ad-on-facebook-is-banned/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/15/google-ad-on-facebook-is-ba... (Google+ Ad banned)

pilif 15y ago

As long as Twitter (and Facebook even more so) don't allow Google to actually index them fully, I don't think that a service like the one outlined here would work very well. And even once these services open up more: At what point would you set the threshold for inclusion of $social_network in the list? I certainly would not want a list of various social network batches under every search result. Only list the ones the user is active in? Sure. But how do you determine "active"? Networks in which the user posts a lot? In which he reads a lot of other users content (how would Google find out about that?)? The integration as it is currently made for G+ basically only works because Google has all that G+ profile data and for it to work as well with other networks, I'd say, Google needs specialized access to it. Or to be more cynical: So twitter wants to have their accounts integrated into the search results of a search engine? Easy: Just create a search engine too and have all of Google's user switch over.

blakeross 15y ago
You don't have to guess how well such a service would work. It has been built and is available on the site. Google has access to the same information about other social profiles that it does about its own profiles, as the tool on the site demonstrates.
- pilif 15y ago
  As I see it, the code that adds social networking links to people in the right side-bar (which is probably the most prominent feature of the bookmarklet) depends on the G+ profile being there. So Google has their own algorithms to, say, connect Yehuda Katz with a search query for "ruby". This means that the plugin only finds ruby people who also have a G+ profile and then adds links to other services too. Now for this to be really useful, it should find people even if they don't have a G+ profile and that is what I wonder whether it's even possible by just crawling the web to the extent allowed by the various services. Adding other Social Networking links to already determined Google+ profiles is not interesting. Finding people on Twitter related to a search term regardless of whether they have a G+ profile or not is the interesting part.
- danmaz74 15y ago

whirlycott1 15y ago

I'd say "focus on the server," which seems to be overloaded and currently unavailable.

falling 15y ago

I find it quite funny to see the exact same phrases used to defend both Google and Apple when they do something unfair: “it's their [website|store], they are free to show what they want, you are not entitled to appear.”

0x006A 15y ago

a link to a facebook page of imdb? this is a joke right?

magicalist 15y ago

I think people are slightly missing the point here. This appears to be less about the google+ personal search results (searching over your friends pictures or whatever), and more about surfacing content on queries where you don't have personalized search results (e.g. that "movie" search that has hugh jackman's profile show up). I think the idea is that if google ranks someone's twitter profile first in the organic results, why not show it in that social box? There is something of a point here. (although for many of the example searches there are several results before any social networking results...so it would seem focusing on the user would have financial and wikipedia results for AT&T before their twitter account is listed. And then we're just back to no elevated results. But social networking is special now, I guess?) This would be a lot more compelling if they would drop the attempt at a "grassroots" "just bringing up the issues for discussion" feel. As it is, it comes off more as that "fair search" group that was really pretty much just expedia and bing. It seems at least plausible that this actually came from some engineers hanging out, discussing this, and writing some code, and if someone had just blogged about it and put it up on github, I think it would be getting a better response (if only to prove the point). Instead, I feel like the page is just trying to manipulate me. It feels like marketing.

nyellin 15y ago

Focus on the user? There are so many sharing links that I can't focus on the search results!

bryanh 15y ago

"Focus on our services (instead)."

j_baker 15y ago

Often these results are irrelevant for users, such as when Google links to Mark Zuckerberg's empty Google+ profile on a search for "facebook". For the record, Mark Zuckerberg can make his profile not visible to search engines if he so wanted: http://support.google.com/plus/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1151728&authuser=1 http://support.google.com/plus/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...

xxbondsxx 15y ago
That's not really the point though; Mark has made _zero_ posts on his Google+ account and updates his real Facebook account fairly frequently. One is a freshly-updated, lively social search result and the other is almost worthless.
eddieplan9 15y ago
This is equivalent of saying Google is giving Google+ pages preferential treatment unless a Google+ page explicitly states it does not want such a treatment. I won't say that is fair.

timruffles 15y ago

Focus on the... profits of our respective companies perhaps? If users want this 'feature' they'll switch to a search engine that supports it. In that case these companies are wasting time whining when they could be scooping up these users. Clearly they don't actually believe users care, so they're whining about it instead.

tonfa 15y ago
Doesn't bing already provide facebook integration?

chucknthem 15y ago

From the source code: http://www.focusontheuser.org/dontbeevil/script.js http://www.focusontheuser.org/dontbeevil/script.js if (/MSIE (\d+\.\d+);/.test(navigator.userAgent)) { alert( "Unfortunately, this tool does not currently work in Internet Explorer. " + "Please try another browser such as Firefox, Chrome, or Safari."); return; } That's not very nice. Surely this can be made to work for at least IE9 :)

djblaze 15y ago
I browsed the source briefly, and while they could get this to work on IE9, there is so much css/dom manipulation (which even ie9 is not great at) that it might slow down the browser enough to be seen as annoying.

movingahead 15y ago

This attempt proofs Google can do better in social results than what it is doing now. But, this also shows what great importance Google gives to Google+. They have made a conscious decision to compromise search quality to push users to Google+. A lot of us may believe that this won't work for Google+, but Google must think otherwise. Google has made their bet on using its most potent weapon - search to increase the user base of Google+. This also shows why we need a strong alternative to Google Search. I hope Bing hooks up with Twitter, Facebook and other services like Foursquare to make a better social search. They have tried too long to beat Google at its own game.

ok_craig 15y ago
"They have made a conscious decision to compromise search quality to push users to Google+" It's my understanding that search results are unchanged - is this wrong? I thought the social box on the side was just something that came up in addition to the natural search results.
- blakeross 15y ago
  This is incorrect, as the second section on this page demonstrates: http://www.focusontheuser.org/examples.php http://www.focusontheuser.org/examples.php
  - ok_craig 15y ago
    Hm, that's not really what I mean. That's just providing additional information in the result. That additional info favors Google+, sure, but it's still not a rearrangement of the primary natural search results.
    - blakeross 15y ago
      The Google+ page is moved up within the natural search results.
    - ok_craig 15y ago

dannyr 15y ago

So in my opinion, my site provides better value for some keywords better than Yelp, Twitter or Facebook. So how can I get preferred placement on Google search results?

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

j_s 15y ago

In an ideal world, maybe... unfortunately the majority of the sentiment on this discussion disagreed with the author: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3497255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3497255 (Nice guys finish first. Eventually.) What's next, giveusersbetterads.org by "several Google employees" to convince Facebook they should allow Google Adsense in Facebook apps?

asadotzler 15y ago

Bookmarklets require too much effort. Get the Firefox restart-less add-on here: http://t.co/OFokUDSs http://t.co/OFokUDSs

tomkarlo 15y ago

While I think they make relevant points, the underlying logic of this whole video is questionable. Before the recent changes, "Jamie Oliver" simply didn't show up when searching for "cooking", I expect. It didn't matter if his twitter or G+ page were the first result for him, because they were probably on page 800 of the search results. Now, with the additional info it has via G+, Google is featuring him and some other people alongside the normal results when you query for Google. Where Twitter falls in the query for "Jamie Oliver" doesn't seem particularly relevant to that. I understand the thinking, but I don't think it makes sense to say that because Jamie Oliver is a top G+ result for "Cooking", and Twitter is the top result for "Jamie Oliver", then Jamie Oliver's Twitter must be the top social result for "cooking". The OP is assuming that search results are somehow transitive in nature, and I'm don't think they should be just taking that for granted. Should Google add links to the other services in those G+ listings coming up alongside the results alongside the cooking SRP? Maybe. But that seems like a UX/business question, not one that you can answer quantitatively.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

daintynews 15y ago

http://marshallk.com/google-pluss-real-goal-is-not-to-kill-facebook-but-to-force-it-to-open http://marshallk.com/google-pluss-real-goal-is-not-to-kill-f... This I think is what Google is doing. The more Facebook opens up, the better for them. And it's working fine, I guess. Since when users switched to the timeline format, some of them had their privacy set to public.