

Google: Focus on the User - blakeross
http://www.focusontheuser.org
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.
======
pilif
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.

~~~
blakeross
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.

~~~
fred_nada
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.

------
magicalist
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.

------
tomkarlo
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.

------
movingahead
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_craig
"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.

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

~~~
ok_craig
Hm, that's not really what I mean. That's just providing additional
information in the result. That additional info favors Google+, sure, but it's
still not a rearrangement of the primary natural search results.

~~~
ok_craig
@blakeross

As a branch of the main Macy's result, yeah. It isn't a natural result itself.
If your goal is to browse simply natural results you just look at the primary
results. Those do not appear to be different.

------
SoftwareMaven
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_s
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...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/15/google-ad-on-facebook-is-banned/)
(Google+ Ad banned)

------
j_baker
_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...](http://support.google.com/plus/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1151728&authuser=1)

~~~
xxbondsxx
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.

------
timruffles
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
Doesn't bing already provide facebook integration?

------
untog
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.

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

------
chucknthem
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
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.

------
j_s
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?

------
OoTheNigerian
_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...](http://marshallk.com/google-pluss-real-goal-is-not-to-kill-
facebook-but-to-force-it-to-open)

------
bryanh
"Focus on our services (instead)."

------
dannyr
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?

------
whirlycott1
I'd say "focus on the server," which seems to be overloaded and currently
unavailable.

------
0x006A
a link to a facebook page of imdb? this is a joke right?

------
yanw
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
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.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
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.

------
falling
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.”

------
daintynews
[http://marshallk.com/google-pluss-real-goal-is-not-to-
kill-f...](http://marshallk.com/google-pluss-real-goal-is-not-to-kill-
facebook-but-to-force-it-to-open)

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.

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

