Facebook and Google have never seen eye to eye. Last November Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg had gone on the Charlie Rose show and suggested that Google (among others) were the bad guys in the internet world. Zuckerberg later went on to make a jab at Google Plus, claiming that it was just a Facebook knock-of. Google’s Bradley Horowitz responded with the riposte that “[Google is] delighted to be underestimated. It’s served us very well to date, and that’s fine by us. I’m not going to clear anything up.”
For months, each played this coy game by refusing to directly engage or discuss the other. That changed yesterday with the arrival of the Don’t Be Evil tool, created by a conglomeration of engineers from Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and other unnamed social networks.
The Chrome extension bookmarklet and accompanying Focus on the User website have been designed to call Google out over the prominent placement of their own Google+ posts and pages in organic search results. This coincided with the launch of Search Plus Your World, the latest Google initiative to customize search engine results.
The creators of the bookmarklet say that Google’s new Search Plus Your World search results run counter to everything the search giant has said they stand for. That instead of using the entire social web, it unfairly gives precendence ato a Google product.
The group has created a video that details the difference in how a fairer Google results page might work that incorporates all social media platforms:
In an interview with Search Engine Watch, a Facebook spokesperson commented dryly that “I think the content of the site and the video say it all best and we don’t really have anything to add beyond that.”
No one is quite sure who sponsored the creation of the tool, but it seems to be just one more quiet blow in this war over social media and the web. This is a strange war to watch. It’s easy to see where Google is coming from. They have a new product they want their users to be exposed to, so they include it on their page. If users find that unfair, then perhaps they might try out Bing or go back to Yahoo. Our money is on users sticking with Google.
The real lesson to take away from all of this is that Google Plus is here to stay. “Evilness” doesn’t really enter in to the equation, Google is going to do what it’s going to do, and it seems unlikely that this new inclusion of Google Plus content will so thoroughly turn of f their users as to cause a mass exodus. By that same token, however, it seems unlikely that Facebook (or Twitter, for that matter) will lose users to Google Plus solely because Google is featuring results from that platform. Perhaps “war” is a bit too strong of a word. Schoolyard tiff might be more accurate, hmm?
