Twitter Says People and Publishers Will Suffer From Google's Social Search | Hacker News Reader

Twitter Says People and Publishers Will Suffer From Google's Social Search

allthingsd.com

28 pointsbproper30 comments

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,

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.

Yeah, we do that now with other areas (radio transmission, fascination with X-Rays, almost every known application of chemistry, etc), but it's weird to think of it happening in our daily lives. What are we doing now that people will look back on us and say "look at what naive fools we used to be"?

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?"

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.

>> 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.

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

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

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.

I think the culture has simply shifted (in the tech world, that happens quickly). Apple bundles Safari with its OS, yet no one cries foul. Yet when Microsoft did this 10 year ago it was investigated for antitrust.

The question is, can you use your ownership of the platform to destroy competitors of apps on that platform? When does it cross into "monopoly"? I have no idea. It seems fair to me that the creator of a platform should be able to introduce new applications and place them in a preferred spot for all to see (e.g. facebook's own apps). As long as this was clear to everyone from the beginning. However, strong-arming OEMs and others into specifically doing anti-competitive things on your behalf is probably wrong.

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.

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.

You can link Twitter to Google under "other profiles" in G+. They could also use OAuth to get your friends.

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.

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

Twitter pulled the plug on Google's firehose access which led Google to shutter Realtime search: http://searchengineland.com/google-realtime-search-the-after...

It is a tempest in a teapot.

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

That just makes me agree more.

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?

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/

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.

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...

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

Are you a lawyer? as I understand it a court would have to declare a monopoly and in this case none has.

Purely from a commonsense point of view however there is no such thing as a monopoly on information retrieval.

Me not being a lawyer doesn't make google less suspect for monopolistic practices. The US senate has been investigating it[1] and and new concerns are raised now[2]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/google-faces-...

http://betanews.com/2012/01/10/googles-new-personalized-sear...

In any case, the one who should be worried is facebook, not twitter. It's also interesting to note how google is going at greater lengths to promote G+ than it did with any of its products before.

There are always bought politicians parroting some special interest, that doesn't mean that they have a clue: http://searchengineland.com/dear-congress-its-not-ok-not-to-...

And what about innocent until proven guilty?

Are they? For sure they have the largest market share, but isn't lack of substitute goods a necessary condition for monopoly? IANAL, but I use Bing all the time on IE9 because it's the default search engine and most of the time I can't even tell the difference. I certainly haven't found a reason to change it.

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.

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.

It all depends on how you define Twitter's (and Google's) market, doesn't it? I'm pretty sure the gap in marketshare between Twitter and closely similar services like Identi.ca, Plurk or Yammer is actually larger than the gap between Google and Binghoo.

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