3 ms·
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 de
by 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 agoIt 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?