Google: Focus on the User | Hacker News Reader

Google: Focus on the User

focusontheuser.org

188 pointsblakeross56 comments

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.

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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.

And let's not forget that Twitter and FB both have search features (actually I'm not sure about FB, I've never been on it, but it has to, right?), and furthermore, they're both in their ways trying to obviate search by providing what people want in other ways. That's the premise of FB as a Google killer right? That social is undermining search as the way people get information on the internet?

Setting aside how absurd I find that notion to be, it seems to me that the whole G+ project is a response to that threat, and it's a response that says "I can duplicate your functionality a lot easier than you can duplicate mine, and it adds a lot more value to my major service to duplicate your functionality, than it adds to your major service to duplicate mine."

It also seems like a play to get access to Twitter and FB data. Google uses free data on the open web. If you don't allow them to index your data for free, why would you expect them to include them in their search results?

As a user, I want Twitter and FB to give Google all of their data, and I want Google to run all of that data through their algorithms and give me the results that are the best, regardless of what service it's on. From where I sit, it doesn't seem like Google is the player that's in the way of that happening.

> If you don't allow them to index your data for free,

> why would you expect them to include them in their search

> results?

This tool demonstrates that Google is already accessing and indexing the data it says it needs to improve its search results. This isn't rhetoric; it's code.

> This tool demonstrates that Google is already accessing and indexing the data it says it needs to improve its search results. This isn't rhetoric; it's code.

It doesn't really demonstrate that. It demonstrates that Google can show G+ pages related to a topic, and that it can show high-ranked social pages linked to the owners of those G+ pages. But it doesn't show that on a broad, scalable basis Google can dependably link from a topic to a highly relevant 3rd-party social page. Demonstrating it on a couple of easy, celebrity-focused queries isn't proof of anything.

The tool isn't limited to celebrity queries. Install it and use it on whatever queries you wish.

I realize the tool isn't limited, but it only works with the (relatively) short list of terms that Google is using to display that Google+ pane.

I've noticed Facebook even asks you to login if you're logged out of Facebook and you're reading on a Facebook page. Why should Google have to deal with that when even Facebook themselves don't want their own data to be very public?

Yes, it is a technical solution to a "problem" (air quotes denoting that this was a conscious business decision by Google).

It brought to my mind the infamous checklists explaining why technical solutions to spam would fail: http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt

Blake why are you guys completely kicking out the legitimate G+ profile links from the search results using the bookmarklet? I thought you were against search result manipulations. I search for people like Guy Kawasaki or Trey Ratcliff who are very active in G+ and yet their profiles are not listed on the first page of the results if I use your bookmarklet.

We are not touching the organic results. The code for the bookmarklet is freely available; anyone can verify that.

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.

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.

As I see it, the code that adds social networking links to people in the right side-bar (which is probably the most prominent feature of the bookmarklet) depends on the G+ profile being there.

So Google has their own algorithms to, say, connect Yehuda Katz with a search query for "ruby". This means that the plugin only finds ruby people who also have a G+ profile and then adds links to other services too.

Now for this to be really useful, it should find people even if they don't have a G+ profile and that is what I wonder whether it's even possible by just crawling the web to the extent allowed by the various services.

Adding other Social Networking links to already determined Google+ profiles is not interesting. Finding people on Twitter related to a search term regardless of whether they have a G+ profile or not is the interesting part.

AFAIK Google only has access to the public information that it can gather by scraping those websites (which isn't an easy feat at all, given the frequency of updates) or using the public APIs, that only give you a limited amount of information.

Until last Summer, Twitter had a contract with Google to give the latter its firehose stream, with all its tweets in real time. AFAIK, it was Twitter that decided not to renew that contract, evidently because they thought they could monetize that information better without Google. But now, apparently, they want their cake and eat it too...

> 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.

Does it demonstrate that? It's more likely that those profiles just show up because of the normal page rank algorithm (eg Jamie Oliver's twitter account ranks highly because so many people link to it). It is a reasonable proxy for popularity for popular people, at least, though there's probably too much noise before you get too far down the long tail. But it isn't the same thing that the OP was talking about.

I actually think it would be cool if google took the more Open Social approach by taking the sites I list in my profile as mine, looked at my friends and frequency of posting where available (more twitter than facebook), and then biased my results to favor my preferred networks. I don't know if it would end up with great results, but it could be an interesting separate tool, perhaps.

normally i feel like i'm a lot more relaxed about privacy than most people on this site, but holy crap. the top voted comment is currently suggesting that facebook open up their entire site to google indexers?

google can do personal search on g+ because they maintain the permissions database for g+ content and won't show private stuff to the wrong people. how do they do that for facebook?

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.

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.

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.

"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.

Incorrect. I did a search for "test" while logged out. In the top 5 results there are 2 results for MG Seigler who I am not connected with in any way.

Then I did another search for NFC Championship game - Again, MG Siegler #5 in the results. Apparently he made a comment that he was going to the game. So this guy who is not associated with football in any way who wrote a 10 word fragment on his wall showed up above the following results...

http://www.nfl.com/news/story/09000d5d82622cb4/article/nfc-c...

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/us/text-message-service-he...

http://blog.sfgate.com/49ers/2012/01/23/photos-from-the-nfc-...

http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1035221-nfc-championship-...

http://espn.go.com/blog/nflnation/post/_/id/52524/page/count...

This was definitely not happening one month ago.

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

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.

@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.

The Google+ page is moved up within the natural search results.

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.

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... (Google+ Ad banned)

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...

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.

This is equivalent of saying Google is giving Google+ pages preferential treatment unless a Google+ page explicitly states it does not want such a treatment. I won't say that is fair.

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.

Doesn't bing already provide facebook integration?

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.

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

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 :)

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.

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?

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...

"Focus on our services (instead)."

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Then educate those people and don't push for some nanny-state mandate by which even if the freedom to switch services is available one service must freely advertise all the others. Not to mention the hypocrisy of Facebook/Twitter blocking data from Google yet they are demanding to be featured anyway.

Yes, but why did anyone feel entitled that their browser should be bundled with Windows? Or that Microsoft shouldn't be allowed to include their own software within their own software? Seems to me that is a sense of entitlement from non Microsoft companies. Yet, it was monopolistic abuse and wiped out Netscape. That is why we have antitrust/anticompetition laws.

Facebook/Twitter aren't the real losers here though. They will survive. The problem is that Google is pushing their results to their average content on Google+ while tossing thousands of smaller content websites aside. Don't expect that to decrease. It is too easy for them to grow profits by pushing their own content. Whether they start other content companies or buy them, this is their growth.

Not that tired meme again. No, it's not the same as Windows+IE: in this case both products are free and both you do not own, it's just a website you visit basically. Also you are not trapped into them and Google didn't go about threatening OEMs.

You aren't familiar with antitrust laws. Because a company has a free product does not mean it can't be anticompetitive. Free means nothing.

Example: If one company owned 90% of the media content in the world and gave it a way for free because they made money on ads does not mean they can't abuse their power. If you started your own website how would people find out about you? 90% of the search engines wouldn't show you. You couldn't advertise on 90% of magazines, websites or tv shows. And 90% of social networks wouldn't allow links going out of their site. And so on.

This is an extreme example, but free means nothing.

Who was trapped into using Windows? Why couldn't you buy another OS?

Threatening OEMs? The MS abuse I was talking about was having to do with IE only. But Google is not innocent of strong-arming companies either. If Yelp didn't allow Google to use its reviews in Google Places, Yelp would be removed from the index entirely. http://searchengineland.com/yelp-google-told-us-its-our-way-...

Google does not own 90% of the market and their product is free as their competitors' products so there is no harm to consumers.

As for Yelp, they asked to not appear on Places and Google told them to use robots.txt if they don't want to be indexed, and the rest is spin and PR.

I would argue on both of your statements, but I don't think you are reading anything I write. :)

Deleted comment

I use the same language against the same language.

Are you a lawyer?

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.”

http://marshallk.com/google-pluss-real-goal-is-not-to-kill-f...

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.

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

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