Google: Focus on the User! (from engineers at Twitter, Facebook and MySpace)

January 24, 2012

Google is in a fun position now – “Damned if you do damned if you don’t”. Basically there’s no right thing they can do. They naturally want to boost their Google+ social network. And at the same time I am sure they (engineers) would love to surface Facebook messages and single tweets, however those two networks don’t want to give Google that capability, especially not for free. They would like them to make their content available at a bit less granular level.

Google on the other hand sees that they will never be allowed to get the raw data from those social networks. From their perspective the only way to provide great search is to prevent anyone else from locking down that data. And that’s the reason for Google+. If the data has to be locked down, Google wants it own the vault and have its keys.

“Focus on the user” could be interpreted multiple ways. For Google that means preventing anyone from locking down any data that is necessary to do search. Even if that means killing competition. From that standpoint it could be argued it is good for the user. Google sees itself as a gift from god to humanity and thus it has to survive to keep giving. This is how evil is born.

Or maybe it’s just a negotiating tactics. We’ll see.

Google: Focus on the User! (from engineers at Twitter, Facebook and MySpace)

Image via Wikipedia

Code How much better would social search be if Google surfaced results from all across the web? The results speak for themselves. 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 …

via: www.focusontheuser.org