

Twitter Says People and Publishers Will Suffer From Google's Social Search - bproper
http://allthingsd.com/20120110/twitter-complains-about-google-giving-preference-to-google-content/

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soumyadeb
This would force twitter and others to open up their APIs to google and other
search engines. Google and twitter had the deal before - not sure who pulled
the plug when it expired in 2011.

Overall, this is probably good for openness of internet, IMHO,

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oldstrangers
One of the bigger worries is that it's stuff like this that might eventually
force the government's hand in creating internet legislation. The issues are
becoming incredibly complex, and its clear these companies aren't just going
to regulate themselves.

Of course, no clear answer exists, and Washington's 2nd grade understanding of
technology certainly won't get us anywhere. I could almost see some kind of
collaborative UN style internet body come into existence in the next 20 or 30
years. It would almost have to given our increasingly wired lifestyles.

It just feels like we're in the golden age of internet freedom and things can
only get worse. I imagine our grand kids looking back on our time in shock at
what we (comparatively) got away with.

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theoj
This brought back memories of the browser wars. Back then it was "Should
Microsoft be allowed to use its control of the desktop to bundle Internet
Explorer with Windows?" Now it's "Should Google be allowed to use its control
of search to bundle Google+ data with search results?"

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yanw
No it doesn't, it's not bundling if both products are free and it's not
bundling when you don't actually _own_ any of them. There are important
nuances between the two cases that some people choose to overlook.

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theoj
>> it's not bundling when you don't actually own any of them

In legal terms you don't own Windows either - MS gives you a license to use
it.

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yanw
Which you pay for. If money doesn't change hands no contract is made thus no
contract will be broken.

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landhar
Since when money changing hands is the sine qua non of contracts ?

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yanw
IANAL so I'm just speculating that if you don't pay for a service you can't
claim that you're owed anything, in this case those being freely indexed by
Google feeling that they are entitled to a placement in search results.

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kylemaxwell
Maybe I'm missing something. Twitter no longer provides Google a firehose
feed, though I'm unsure where the breakdown originated. But Google _does_
index Twitter and includes results from it. Google+ results get a higher
ranking, and that's the issue, right?

From somebody outside the social media echo chamber (i.e. a user, not a
maven), this seems like a tempest in a teapot. I'd welcome some elaboration.

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soumyadeb
If you are logged into google, google knows who you are. It will produce
results from _your_ Google+ network even if that information is not public.

It can't do that for twitter. It doesn't know your twitter ID, nor does it
have access to your twitter network. It can crawl all the twitter pages just
as it crawls the rest of the web but that may not be as relevant as the search
results from your network (and hence rightly may be ranked lower).

If twitter wants to appear alongside your Google+ results, they would have to
open up their twitter social graph to google (or any other search engine) so
that google knows who you are and can produce results accordingly.

As a user I think this is good. I don't like the idea of my data being held
hostage by sites.

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groks
Google knows who you are on Twitter if you tell it:

<https://plus.google.com/connectedaccounts>

And because Twitter is largely public, Google knows who you follow and will
show tweets and links in serps. Has done for some time now.

You can tell Google who you are on github, but I haven't noticed any
interesting search results.

You right about password protected content though. You can tell Google who you
are on Facebook but it can't crawl most of the data.

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soumyadeb
Great. People have all the more reason to link the accounts now. I just did.

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Calamitous
"Burger King says People and Chefs Will Suffer From McDonald's Big Mac"

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tsunamifury
That just makes me agree more.

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benologist
Pretty flakey reason ... by the time someone is googling a topic the news has
already broken.

I can't recall or even imagine any context where a tweet is going to be the
best result for something I'm searching for. What could they be relevant
results for?

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akg
Google has a right to promote it's own products and it has no obligation to
Twitter or Facebook or anyone else. People will use the product to the extent
to which it serves their purpose.

I guess if Google does proceed to neglect data from Twitter, Facebook and
other mediums it might be a new opportunity in search. Who said search is a
solve problem. In fact, I think the guys at Greplin are working on this very
problem: <https://www.greplin.com/>

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EGreg
LOL, if Twitter's argument is that "time and time again, news breaks first on
Twitter", then I don't se how this applies to crawled results, only their
realtime feed. And since they don't have that deal with Google anymore, those
results that "break first" are irrelevant to their point.

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yanw
They don't really get to have a say in this. Google doesn't dictate to Twitter
how they should conduct their business and Twitter would do well to follow
their lead.

If I recall correctly Twitter refused to renew Google's firehose access and
forced them to shutter Realtime search: [http://searchengineland.com/google-
realtime-search-the-after...](http://searchengineland.com/google-realtime-
search-the-aftermath-of-the-google-twitter-split-84794)

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zerostar07
Twitter is not an effective monopoly though. With great power comes great
antitrust regulation.

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angryasian
theres plenty of competition. So now we're supporting the government stepping
in, when theres plenty of competition but just nothing thats good enough to
compete. This is not an America I want to live in.

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zerostar07
As I don't live in the US, i always found the US black-or-white politics
unusual. People seem to argue for more or less government, but not about the
_right_ government.

