And the souls mounting up to God, Went by her like thin flames - Dante Gabriel Rossetti
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Developers create a tool to use Google against itself
THREE SOCIAL NETWORKING DEVELOPERS have created a tool that turns Google on itself to find a workaround for the internet search firm's inward looking focus.
Recently Google tweaked its search results to place higher weighting on personal results, ones cribbed from a user history, or those in which it thinks its users might be interested. This attracted some critics, including this trio.
"How much better would social search be if Google surfaced results from all across the web? The results speak for themselves," write the developers.
"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 Google+ results are currently hardcoded."
The tool, which is a piece of script called "Don't be evil", tackles the way that Google returns results that, although they are relevant, are not as relevant as they could be. For example, it might recommend that someone look at a Google+ account that has not been updated for some time, but ignore another that is used more frequently.
"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?" they asked.
"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."
The "Don't be Evil" bookmarklet aims to fix the discrepancy here, and "googles Google to see if Google finds a result more relevant than Google+". µ
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I don't think Google is being evil.
All these other companies have basically made it difficult for Google to use any of their information and their claims of Google+ being at the top of search results is on a slant.
The Google+ results are featured in a separate area. The standard search results are as they would be.
Of course it seems there might be a conflict of interest, but I think they have a solid argument for not being able to include the other social networks in their social personalized engine.
I think it is important as for PR, for them to make sure there customers are aware of the situation and not allow the competition to set them up as the evil villain. I think that is an over dramatization of the situation, sadly, that people who are not aware of the situation just might believe off hand.
Look, I know what Social Networking is and where to find it.
If I want to 'get involved' or have skewed search results, I'll seek out a social networking site (and psychiatric help)
Until then, stop pissing about with search results based on what you THINK I am interested in. On the basis of everything else with which I've been presented that Web2.0 THINKS I'm interested, it simply doesn't work and I'm hacked off weeding out useful stuff from the twaddle.