Google: Focus on the User

http://www.focusontheuser.org

by blakeross • 15 years ago

188 54 15 years 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.

yanw4• 15 years 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• 15 years 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.

SoftwareMaven2• 15 years 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.

yanw4• 15 years 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_nada5• 15 years 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.

yanw4• 15 years 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.

OoTheNigerian• 15 years 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-f...

untog• 15 years 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.

SoftwareMaven2• 15 years 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_s3• 15 years ago

I believe Facebook's position on use of competing technologies in Facebook apps is relevant: 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-ba... (Google+ Ad banned)

pilif2• 15 years 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.

blakeross6• 15 years 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.

pilif2• 15 years 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• 15 years ago

AFAIK Google only has access to the public information that it can gather by scraping those websites (which isn't an easy feat at all, given the frequency of updates) or using the public APIs, that only give you a limited amount of information.

Until last Summer, Twitter had a contract with Google to give the latter its firehose stream, with all its tweets in real time. AFAIK, it was Twitter that decided not to renew that contract, evidently because they thought they could monetize that information better without Google. But now, apparently, they want their cake and eat it too...

magicalist2• 15 years ago

> 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.

Does it demonstrate that? It's more likely that those profiles just show up because of the normal page rank algorithm (eg Jamie Oliver's twitter account ranks highly because so many people link to it). It is a reasonable proxy for popularity for popular people, at least, though there's probably too much noise before you get too far down the long tail. But it isn't the same thing that the OP was talking about.

I actually think it would be cool if google took the more Open Social approach by taking the sites I list in my profile as mine, looked at my friends and frequency of posting where available (more twitter than facebook), and then biased my results to favor my preferred networks. I don't know if it would end up with great results, but it could be an interesting separate tool, perhaps.

fred_nada5• 15 years ago

Blake:

If Focus on the User really doesn't want to be "evil" and you want to "focus on the user" then the plugin needs to be changed. The edits the plugin makes are better, but it just looks like Facebook/Twitter are just making sure they get their websites mentioned. It appears they are not focused on the user, but focused on how it will help them.

Here are some major suggestions:

1. If someone searches for cars in Google, 95% of the time they are looking to either research cars, buy a car, or the movie Cars. First of all do you honestly feel that Ferrari's facebook or google+ page is more relevant/useful than the websites of CarsDirect, Edmunds, or MotorTrend? The Google+/Facebook pages are more prominent than these websites. That makes zero sense. I don't know if you can do this, but if possible the "People and Pages" section should be removed. If not, see #2.

2. Why would the first result be Ferrari's facebook page in this search over Ferrari's own web site?

3. The Autosuggestion thing should work the same way as above. When I search for Matt Cutts I am not looking for either his Facebook or his Google Plus page, the most relevant result would be mattcutts.com, no? Or just remove the autosuggestion thing period. Assuming that I want to go see Matt Cutts Facebook profile over his Google+ profile is silly.

4. Make it so that you can actually remove Google+ results period. When I search for NFC Championship Game I don't care to see that MG Siegler went to that game. Nor would I want to see that on facebook either. It just ideally would be removed.

joebadmo• 15 years ago

And let's not forget that Twitter and FB both have search features (actually I'm not sure about FB, I've never been on it, but it has to, right?), and furthermore, they're both in their ways trying to obviate search by providing what people want in other ways. That's the premise of FB as a Google killer right? That social is undermining search as the way people get information on the internet?

Setting aside how absurd I find that notion to be, it seems to me that the whole G+ project is a response to that threat, and it's a response that says "I can duplicate your functionality a lot easier than you can duplicate mine, and it adds a lot more value to my major service to duplicate your functionality, than it adds to your major service to duplicate mine."

It also seems like a play to get access to Twitter and FB data. Google uses free data on the open web. If you don't allow them to index your data for free, why would you expect them to include them in their search results?

As a user, I want Twitter and FB to give Google all of their data, and I want Google to run all of that data through their algorithms and give me the results that are the best, regardless of what service it's on. From where I sit, it doesn't seem like Google is the player that's in the way of that happening.

blakeross6• 15 years ago

> If you don't allow them to index your data for free,

> why would you expect them to include them in their search

> results?

This tool demonstrates that Google is already accessing and indexing the data it says it needs to improve its search results. This isn't rhetoric; it's code.

notatoad• 15 years ago

normally i feel like i'm a lot more relaxed about privacy than most people on this site, but holy crap. the top voted comment is currently suggesting that facebook open up their entire site to google indexers?

google can do personal search on g+ because they maintain the permissions database for g+ content and won't show private stuff to the wrong people. how do they do that for facebook?

whirlycott1• 15 years ago

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

nyellin• 15 years ago

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

bryanh• 15 years ago

"Focus on our services (instead)."

j_baker• 15 years 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&answe...

xxbondsxx• 15 years 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• 15 years 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• 15 years 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• 15 years ago

Doesn't bing already provide facebook integration?

chucknthem• 15 years ago

From the source code: 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• 15 years 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• 15 years 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_craig3• 15 years 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.

blakeross6• 15 years ago

This is incorrect, as the second section on this page demonstrates: http://www.focusontheuser.org/examples.php

fred_nada5• 15 years ago

Incorrect. I did a search for "test" while logged out. In the top 5 results there are 2 results for MG Seigler who I am not connected with in any way.

Then I did another search for NFC Championship game - Again, MG Siegler #5 in the results. Apparently he made a comment that he was going to the game. So this guy who is not associated with football in any way who wrote a 10 word fragment on his wall showed up above the following results...

http://www.nfl.com/news/story/09000d5d82622cb4/article/nfc-c...

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/us/text-message-service-he...

http://blog.sfgate.com/49ers/2012/01/23/photos-from-the-nfc-...

http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1035221-nfc-championship-...

http://espn.go.com/blog/nflnation/post/_/id/52524/page/count...

This was definitely not happening one month ago.

dannyr• 15 years 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?

falling• 15 years 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• 15 years ago

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

magicalist2• 15 years 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.

j_s3• 15 years 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 (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• 15 years ago

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

tomkarlo3• 15 years 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.

daintynews• 15 years ago

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.

Google: Focus on the User

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