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Your comment is very confusing to me. If it's a public API, why would Google have to return anything? And Google's proposition to all web sites everywhere is t

Your comment is very confusing to me. If it's a public API, why would Google have to return anything? And Google's proposition to all web sites everywhere is that in exchange for indexing their content, they provide exposure through the best search engine and the main interface to the web for most people. This is also what FB and Twitter are complaining about: that they aren't receiving proper exposure. It seems like a fair deal to me, and for Twitter and FB to be complaining about lack of exposure when they're trying to charge for the data that would appropriately affect their ranking is what seems absurdly hypocritical to me.

dedward 15y ago
twitter and facebook are big enough to complain. they dont need google right now, thay can stand on their own.
surferbayarea 15y ago
search for mark zuckerberg in google. Which is the first social network page that shows up in the search ranking(ranked by google based on publicly available data and its own click-thru data). Why dont they just show that page rather than the google-plus page, whose rank is probably so low it doesn't even show up in the organic search first 10 pages... I'm saying that the kind of click-thru data that google is asking for is private business-critical data. If google expects facebook/twitter to release that, that is akin to google being asked to release the click-data on all query/website combinations which forms the most critical signal in search ranking.
- joebadmo 15y ago
  I'm saying it's fine for Twitter and FB to withhold that data. But they can't then complain about not being ranked fairly. Conversely, Google started off complaining about not getting access to FB and Twitter data. Then they shut up and made a competing product. FB and Twitter are free to do the same, but I think what Google has just showed is that it's a lot easier for Google to make a compelling social network than it is for FB or Twitter to make a compelling search engine. They're complaining because they're scared, and, quite frankly, they should be. I honestly don't really see the downside to them opening their data to Google, though. They were in a better position before Google started G+. Google didn't want to make a social network. They just wanted the data. They had the open social initiative and were trying to make social networks interoperable, but FB and Twitter resisted. They sort of forced Google into the position of competing directly with them. Now they're complaining about it. What really confuses me is what was the downside to them opening up to Google? (Esp. Twitter, who actually had a deal where they were getting paid for access to the firehose.) Google wasn't competing with them directly. In fact, Google was in a position to direct a lot of traffic to them. The only thing I can imagine is that both FB and Twitter thought they were going to be able to obviate search and tried aggressively for that. I don't know why they thought Google would sit still for that, though.
  - surferbayarea 15y ago
    :) no data is being witheld ! Both facebook.com/zuck and plus.google.com/zuck are public pages. As with all other docs in google's index, they should just use signals like click-data to decide which page shows up. This has nothing to do with private data or not getting access. That's just all PR bullshit.
    - joebadmo 15y ago
      Normal ranking algorithms apply normally. Social networking profiles have extra data, you know, like social activity and social graph, that Google doesn't have access to. The pages you're talking about already show up and are ranked normally like all other pages. G+ pages show up higher because they have a lot of extra google juice from social signals. Those are the ones Twitter and FB are complaining about.
squarecog 15y ago
Disclaimer 1: I work for Twitter. Disclaimer 2: Not a twitter spokesperson, opinions are my own. I don't understand how so many people are missing the point demonstrated by http://www.focusontheuser.org/ http://www.focusontheuser.org/. It uses information available from Google search to inject twitter, facebook, etc results into the "your world (as long as it's google+)" module. The ranking it uses is Google's ranking of the relevant results. No special API access. No back-end deals. No money. It's stuff that's available to Google and that Google already has and has already ranked. If they choose to dilute the worth of their search engine by injecting less-than-relevant (according to their own relevance algorithm) results in order to attempt to grow Plus (presumably hoping that'll ultimately increase the revenue to offset the losses on the search engine side of the business), they are perfectly within their rights to do so. Just don't buy their "oh we'd be happy to show more stuff but boo-hoo we don't have the data" line -- they totally have the data, and it doesn't require sweetheart deals. The only thing they can't do is grab your personal social graph and re-rank according to it. So they use something they know is sub-par (Plus's currently very partial graph) and don't bother dialing in relevance signals against their own best-in-the-world search engine.
- mayanksinghal 15y ago
  It is true that Google rated them on top for 'Organic' results, but the use of following someone on Google+ is not just that you want to see what they publish (use it just like a social network). There is more to it, what they +1 and share has direct effect on how things are ranked for you in later queries. This information is not available for other cases - not realtime/easily anyways. (Twitter closed their hose, Facebook is tricky to parse and their APIs are incredibly slow!). Not related to you, but I did some experimentation on my own and published it at: halfaclick.blogspot.com/2012/01/focus-on-thy-users.html. It is not that FB (contributors from where helped develop the FOTU) shows any more focus than Google. Also the way Focus On The User portrayed the entire thing was not that they are giving a tool that makes Google better but that Google was not using their information. And why just Facebook, Twitter and MySpace? Why not HN, Quora, SO and others?

dedward 15y ago

twitter and facebook are big enough to complain. they dont need google right now, thay can stand on their own.

surferbayarea 15y ago

search for mark zuckerberg in google. Which is the first social network page that shows up in the search ranking(ranked by google based on publicly available data and its own click-thru data). Why dont they just show that page rather than the google-plus page, whose rank is probably so low it doesn't even show up in the organic search first 10 pages... I'm saying that the kind of click-thru data that google is asking for is private business-critical data. If google expects facebook/twitter to release that, that is akin to google being asked to release the click-data on all query/website combinations which forms the most critical signal in search ranking.

joebadmo 15y ago
I'm saying it's fine for Twitter and FB to withhold that data. But they can't then complain about not being ranked fairly. Conversely, Google started off complaining about not getting access to FB and Twitter data. Then they shut up and made a competing product. FB and Twitter are free to do the same, but I think what Google has just showed is that it's a lot easier for Google to make a compelling social network than it is for FB or Twitter to make a compelling search engine. They're complaining because they're scared, and, quite frankly, they should be. I honestly don't really see the downside to them opening their data to Google, though. They were in a better position before Google started G+. Google didn't want to make a social network. They just wanted the data. They had the open social initiative and were trying to make social networks interoperable, but FB and Twitter resisted. They sort of forced Google into the position of competing directly with them. Now they're complaining about it. What really confuses me is what was the downside to them opening up to Google? (Esp. Twitter, who actually had a deal where they were getting paid for access to the firehose.) Google wasn't competing with them directly. In fact, Google was in a position to direct a lot of traffic to them. The only thing I can imagine is that both FB and Twitter thought they were going to be able to obviate search and tried aggressively for that. I don't know why they thought Google would sit still for that, though.
- surferbayarea 15y ago
  :) no data is being witheld ! Both facebook.com/zuck and plus.google.com/zuck are public pages. As with all other docs in google's index, they should just use signals like click-data to decide which page shows up. This has nothing to do with private data or not getting access. That's just all PR bullshit.
  - joebadmo 15y ago
    Normal ranking algorithms apply normally. Social networking profiles have extra data, you know, like social activity and social graph, that Google doesn't have access to. The pages you're talking about already show up and are ranked normally like all other pages. G+ pages show up higher because they have a lot of extra google juice from social signals. Those are the ones Twitter and FB are complaining about.

squarecog 15y ago

Disclaimer 1: I work for Twitter. Disclaimer 2: Not a twitter spokesperson, opinions are my own. I don't understand how so many people are missing the point demonstrated by http://www.focusontheuser.org/ http://www.focusontheuser.org/. It uses information available from Google search to inject twitter, facebook, etc results into the "your world (as long as it's google+)" module. The ranking it uses is Google's ranking of the relevant results. No special API access. No back-end deals. No money. It's stuff that's available to Google and that Google already has and has already ranked. If they choose to dilute the worth of their search engine by injecting less-than-relevant (according to their own relevance algorithm) results in order to attempt to grow Plus (presumably hoping that'll ultimately increase the revenue to offset the losses on the search engine side of the business), they are perfectly within their rights to do so. Just don't buy their "oh we'd be happy to show more stuff but boo-hoo we don't have the data" line -- they totally have the data, and it doesn't require sweetheart deals. The only thing they can't do is grab your personal social graph and re-rank according to it. So they use something they know is sub-par (Plus's currently very partial graph) and don't bother dialing in relevance signals against their own best-in-the-world search engine.

mayanksinghal 15y ago
It is true that Google rated them on top for 'Organic' results, but the use of following someone on Google+ is not just that you want to see what they publish (use it just like a social network). There is more to it, what they +1 and share has direct effect on how things are ranked for you in later queries. This information is not available for other cases - not realtime/easily anyways. (Twitter closed their hose, Facebook is tricky to parse and their APIs are incredibly slow!). Not related to you, but I did some experimentation on my own and published it at: halfaclick.blogspot.com/2012/01/focus-on-thy-users.html. It is not that FB (contributors from where helped develop the FOTU) shows any more focus than Google. Also the way Focus On The User portrayed the entire thing was not that they are giving a tool that makes Google better but that Google was not using their information. And why just Facebook, Twitter and MySpace? Why not HN, Quora, SO and others?