Don’t be evil, Facebook, Twitter and MySpace tell Google

Facebook, Twitter and MySpace engineers have responded to Google’s integration of Google+ into its search results with a bookmarklet called “ Don’t Be Evil ”. At the click of a button, Don’t Be Evil users can expand Google’s Search Plus Your World results to include searches from Facebook, Twitter and MySpace.

Google’s preferential treatment of Google+ in its new search results, currently only available on its American site, raised Twitter’s dander and brought criticism from commentators and privacy groups .

Focus On The User , the group of engineers that developed Don’t Be Evil, explains that their tool searches only Google, but it does it in a way that provides better results than Search Plus Your World. They explain what the bookmarklet does:

“When you search for “cooking” today, Google decides that renowned chef Jamie Oliver is a relevant social result. That makes sense. But rather than linking to Jamie’s Twitter profile, which is updated daily, Google links to his Google+ profile, which was last updated nearly two months ago. Is Google’s relevance algorithm simply misguided?

No. If you search Google for Jamie Oliver directly, his Twitter profile is the first social result that appears. His abandoned Google+ profile doesn’t even appear on the first page of results. When Google’s engineers are allowed to focus purely on relevancy, they get it right.

So that’s what our “bookmarklet” does. It looks at the three places where Google only shows Google+ results and then automatically googles Google to see if Google finds a result more relevant than Google+.”

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The bookmarklet behaves differently to the “hide personal results” toggle which Google now provides on each search page. Turning personalised results off does not affect the side-bar showing Google+ links, it only makes the main search more objective. The Don’t Be Evil bookmarklet, on the other hand, adjusts that side-bar to show the top social results for key personalities, regardless of which network they use.

Google has portrayed Search Plus Your World as a way for users to get more relevant results, but others see it as directly contradicting Google’s original raison d’être. Sarah Lacy wrote :

“This is a Google v. Google issue.

Here’s what Larry Page said in his Playboy interview before the company went public: “Most portals show their own content above content elsewhere on the web. We feel that’s a conflict of interest, analogous to taking money for search results. Their search engine doesn’t necessarily provide the best results; it provides the portal’s results. Google conscientiously tries to stay away from that. We want to get you out of Google and to the right place as fast as possible. It’s a very different model.”

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She also quoted Google’s pre-IPO filing:

“Google users trust our systems to help them with important decisions: medical, financial and many others. Our search results are the best we know how to produce. They are unbiased and objective, and we do not accept payment for them or for inclusion or more frequent updating. We also display advertising, which we work hard to make relevant, and we label it clearly. This is similar to a well-run newspaper, where the advertisements are clear and the articles are not influenced by the advertisers’ payments. We believe it is important for everyone to have access to the best information and research, not only to the information people pay for you to see.”

In a comprehensive post on the issue, search engine expert Danny Sullivan, said that Don’t Be Evil “shows what Google could have done to better serve searchers, if it had wanted to.” He went on to say:

The Google search engine […> was founded on the idea that it should be fair to all. That is, after all, what a good search engine should do — provide the best results, not the results best for its parent company. The continued Google+ification of Google’s search results is bringing that fairness into question.

The bookmarklet’s name, Don’t Be Evil, is a reference to Google’s original unofficial motto, which has since been deprecated in favour of “ you can make money without doing evil ”. The domain name Focus On The User refers to Google’s  first ‘core principle’: “Focus on the user and all else will follow”.

But using Google’s own words, not to mention its own search, against it, Focus On The User is highlighting the fact that Google has chosen to tread this path. It did not have to skew its search results with content from its own properties; it could easily have insisted that its search engineers be ruthlessly objective when developing their algorithms. Instead, Google has privileged Google+ results, making Google less useful and less trustworthy.

When this is paired with the fact that Google is now automatically signing up new Google users to Google+ , whether they want it or not, it’s clear that Google’s search is only going to become less and less reliable. Perhaps this is an opportunity for Bing , or even plucky search underdog, Duck Duck Go to flourish.