Google Fires Back at Twitter: You Took Yourself Out of Search

Sullivan said he thought Google had enough permission to include links from networks like Twitter in its search results, Schmidt said: “That’s your opinion. If you could arrange a letter from Facebook and Twitter to us, that would be helpful.” [1]

Sounds like the reporter expects Google to be able to scrape and index all tweets in real time. The whole point here is that (1) that's a big deal and (2) Twitter would prefer to charge dearly for that access if they allowed it at all. In negotiating terms, Google+ provides Google with a great BATNA in this situation where previously all they had was "pay whatever Twitter asks to index tweets or go without".

Frankly, the "I believe you have permission, make it happen!" argument hinted at in the above quote sounds just as naive as the Congressman who says "We can do it! We have the technology!" about SOPA.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...

The posturing going on right now between Google, Facebook and Twitter is childish and hypocritical. Each company is only interested in leverage against each other, pure and simple. And when that approach stalls, they attempt to curry favor among the public with their situationally-convenient comments.

The disingenuous collective here is ridiculous. Google and Twitter haggle over dollars, Twitter says no thanks, and Google says Twitter "took themselves out of search"? Google goes with what it has for real-time data (Google-plus) and incorporates that into search results, and Twitter calls it "bad for people"? For all the smart people involved in these organizations, I find this public conversation makes everyone involved look really small and petty.

Similar to the game of adding "in bed" to every fortune from a fortune cookie, I now append "because we want to be in control" to every statement from Google, Facebook or Twitter.

If Google had to pay every web-service out there for the privilege to index their otherwise free content, that could cost Google more money than is possible for them to spend.

Then again, Twitter and Facebook are certainly large enough that some kind of deal could have been negotiated. But if they did that, would other social networks uproar in protest because now it's not just Google monopolizing their power.. it's the 3 largest websites out there doing it together.

I do think we should be worried about letting google get too strong a walled garden. The most worrisome thing about google is that we depend upon so many google products, that it might be difficult to see what we are missing if they started to overly favor google offerings. I don't think google has gone there yet, but it is something to keep track of. That being said, twitter has no excuse to complain if they did simply remove themselves from google's results. I suspect that in fact they negotiated and got a better deal going exclusive with bing.

I think that Twitter search is a real missed opportunity, I was hoping that Google with all their resources would be able to capitalize on it, but looks like Twitter isn't playing along.

I did a university project (retreave.com) which used the streaming API to receive tweets, index the pages they linked to, and then provide a lucene based search engine for it. It's really cool to search for say 'design books' and see what your twitter network has reccomended that relates to it (and of course, the search doesn't just search the tweet text, but the page text as well). It ranked results based on social stature in addition to relevance (ie a link tweeted by lots of people is higher ranked)

Unfortunately the User Streams API only scales to a few users, and I've been waiting for 9 months for an invite to the Site Streams Beta, but looks like they don't want me to make their search useful either.

I don't understand why there is a deal at all. Why isn't the situation simply that Google indexes things (like tweets) unless they have a rel=nofollow?

Once upon a time it was possible to get a clean (not rel=nofollow) link from one's Twitter profile: http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/twitter-backlink-tip.html

Presumably for anti-spam reasons, Matt Cutts (of Google, and regular Hacker News commenter) implied in a tweet that Twitter would want to fix this: https://twitter.com/mattcutts/statuses/865610396

I think this implies - in my opinion rightly - that Google want or wanted links on Twitter to have the nofollow attribute set.

Does it not make sense that Google would want to create as much synergy as possible between their offerings?

I don't understand the concern here. It looks to me like they are going to use a small amount of screen space to let users know how many relevant Google+ links were found in the search. All of the Google+ links will be collapsed at the top. The other 95% of the page layout and result is the same.

I don't mean to go off topic - but for some reason the imagine of the Google 'G' and the Twitter 'T' just looked like the word 'Git' to me, so I was hopelessly waiting for more controversy involving Github to make it's way into the article...

http://8.mshcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/google-vs-twi...

It all depends on how you look at the overall system Google has created. If one considers the entirety of Google+ to be a mere component of Google Search (like the now-extinct Friends section of Netflix was), then one can better reconcile this situation with supposed fairness. After all, what's to stop Bing or Yahoo from creating a social component to their products which affect search?

So the issue in is not one of ethics, but of how Google is marketing Google+. When all that existed was the +1 button, no one complained about ethics. Nothing has changed since then except a reworking of the information architecture of the same +1 data and processes. Google seems to believe that Google+ needs to exist independently of Search. If they're gonna stick with that route, they need to open the Search platform to 3rd party integration.

This fight is going to spill over to Facebook too -- Google has been trying to get Facebook to open up for a while.

I can't help but be reminded of early 90's Microsoft when I read about what Google is doing lately. They're definitely on the "extend" phase of embrace, extend, extinguish. They're creating their own little insular community. Search results return Google+ results first and prominently at the top. Their browser has features that no other browser supports (native client, Dart etc). Their previously free APIs are now going to cost lots and lots of money (Maps). None of these things are bad in and of themselves, and all of it is certainly their choice. However, if this is the direction they're headed then I want no part of it.

Edit: For those of you who find my comment off topic - did you even read the article or just the summary? Here are some relevant quotes:

"Twitter had criticized Google’s new social search feature, which it calls Search plus Your World, on Tuesday. As we’ve seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter, its statement said. We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone."

"Sullivan told Schmidt he thought one feature of Search plus Your World, which recommends relevant people to follow on Google+ but not other networks, is the equivalent of saying ‘hey, you can only find information about finance on Google finance. You cannot find information about finance anywhere else."

Clearly people are upset about Google trying to block out competitor's results. I believe my comment is completely ON topic.

Edit 2: Wow, I had no idea how many Google apologists were out there. I had high hopes that the Hacker News community might actually be objective and not just fawn all over Google. Christ was I mistaken.