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The thing about social relevance is it has to still be relevant. Some of the examples out there, like linking to Google+ profiles that aren't updated vs twitter profiles that are, throw relevance right out the window in the favor of a “social” link.

In essence, if they can't get those social signals via fb or twitter, they simply shouldn't use them. Trying to build your own social network that is getting questionable traction (at least among the majority of the people I know), then using that network to judge search results, means that your search results suffer. Your social network has to be the one people are using before the social signals are actually useful and can be said to truly help with relevance.

That is the fundamental problem here, and unless the promotion of Google+ content results in better (not higher, because they've got plenty of accounts, but better) traction for that social network, then they're shooting result quality in the foot, if not directly in the head.

I agree that the social relevancy stuff is clearly not very good yet. But 1. I expect it to get better; and 2. Google faces a chicken-and-egg problem of not being able to extract meaningful signal from an unused social network, and a social network that no one will use, especially if it has no meaningful impact on search.

Bootstrapping the social product by funneling your actually successful product's users into it seems like a fairly obvious and reasonable approach to me. (I'd rather not get into an antitrust argument here, since that's been done to death, and I find it pretty uninteresting to begin with.)

> The two previous "compromises" you cite are both examples of giving you what you want, instead of what you said you want. While your anecdotal data says that you are annoyingly misled by that, I'm sure there's a measure of selection bias there, and I'm sure Google has a lot more than anecdotal data.

You can wave your hands around in pretty patterns all you want – the fact remains I'm a user who used to enjoy the product and now is frustrated by it. I'm not alone in this. Have they annoyed enough users for it to be a big problem? We'll see. But big or not – it's a problem. Adoption curves are led by early adopters. Do they really want to send the sort of person who was once a Google advocate into the arms of a competing service?

> I find it strange that everyone seems to want Google to just keep doing what it's been doing, to, in a word, stagnate. I, for one, am happy to see Google continue to do big things, undertake big initiatives, respond to a changing world.

I don't think we actually disagree here. If Google does nothing, it's dead.

I'm just not sure that the something they've chosen to do is going to be a good idea. If they lose the plot on search, there's not much to fall back on. But, sometimes you do have to bet the farm.

You can wave your hands around in pretty patterns all you want – the fact remains I'm a user who used to enjoy the product and now is frustrated by it. I'm not alone in this. Have they annoyed enough users for it to be a big problem? We'll see. But big or not – it's a problem.

I'm not sure what you mean by "wave your hands around in pretty patterns." I'm not denying that these things annoy some or even many users. I'm saying Google's pretty obviously in the best position to be able to tell, and famously and religiously acts from that position to a fault.

We seem to agree that Google can't do nothing. I guess my perspective on it is that Google's willingness to change even its core source of revenue continues to draw admiration from me.

I think we disagree on Google's legendary omniscience. Minimizing the years-long frustration I, and many I've talked to, have experienced because Google knows best is a hollow argument to me.

The quality of their product degraded and they just kinda... did nothing about it for awhile. It got so bad it had to turn into a press thing before they did something about it. The press is damn lazy, so for my money, that means something.

As to the rest – I share you admiration for that kind of gumption. Money can so easily blind and poison progress. So the strategy to continue evolving is sound! The tactics, though, are dubious.

I'd say that any changes to search need to be made with relevance, convenience and user satisfaction as inviolable factors. Anything else is playing with fire in a library, if you're Google.

Or maybe not. We'll see.

I just really want my 2007-era Google search back.

That seems like a perfectly reasonable point to collegially disagree on. I can't say that I have any special insight into what goes on inside Google, but contrary to your experience, I feel my search experience has generally gotten better. I doubt that Google at any point "did nothing" about search quality, but again, I have no special insight there. I do think that Google frantically doing something in opposition to a hostile SEOsphere can look like nothing, while in fact being a whole lot.

I do agree that the tactics are often dubious. I certainly don't always agree with them. But I can simultaneously understand the motivations behind them. I would have loved to see more grand, open initiatives like Wave, even as it failed spectacularly, but I can understand the trepidation.

You can't go back. 2007-era Google would be unusable with all the SEO-hacks that people have discovered since then. Google has to keep tuning their algorithms to stay ahead of the "optimizers" and spammers.

I'm sensible of the challenges Google faces algorithmically. I was speaking solely of user experience – how the product interprets my input.

Google's pretty obviously in the best position to be able to tell, and famously and religiously acts from that position to a fault.

You said it. I'm reminded of a line from Stephenson's Snow Crash:

Hiro runs down the center of the Towne Hall... He turns off all the techno-shit in his goggles. All it does is confuse him; he stands there reading statistics about his own death even as it's happening to him. Very post-modern.

Google's big mistakes will be the best documented mistakes in human history, especially in retrospect when historians have sufficient time to sort the data from the chaff. But that doesn't mean the mistakes won't happen.

This will get rid of synonyms.

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2011/11/google-verbatim.htm...

My experience matches yours. The synonyms and spelling corrections are tools that make my experience with google much better.

The issue, for me, continues to be the quality of the results. I still have a lot of issues with duplicate content polluting the results (particularly on programming related queries). I still have to dive a few pages deep way too often to find what I really want.

Although I've yet to find a competitor who consistently does better (or even as well).

I agree! Thank you for making this comment. Google is only doing what it must to compete in the social search market. Google has all the incentive to bring Facebook and Twitter directly into their search results, but Facebook and Twitter have the incentives to create silos. The only option was for Google to do it's own thing! Now Facebook and Twitter are just bitching and moaning about having some stiff competition.

> Google is only doing what it must to compete in the social search market.

But, is there really such a market? I remember reading a blog post from a FB employee (don't have the link at hand) saying that Google over-dramatized FB's willingness to go into search, be it "social search" or whatever. What brings people to FB, and more to the point, what makes them spending hours (literally) each day on that site is not their search feature (which I'd say is not that good) but the fact that everyone and everything has a profile or a page or something (yes, maybe even the stray-dog from around my building's corner that a lot of my neighbors feed regularly - try creating a page for him on Google+).

> Do people disagree that social signals can add to relevance? If not, then how does Google get these social signals, if they're locked out of FB and twitter?

Let's say fb/twitter release a public api to access the social signals. So things like number of likes on a particular news page. In return, is google willing to release the data on number of clicks on a particular search result for all queries? Seems a bit hyprocritical no ?

Your comment is very confusing to me. If it's a public API, why would Google have to return anything?

And Google's proposition to all web sites everywhere is that in exchange for indexing their content, they provide exposure through the best search engine and the main interface to the web for most people. This is also what FB and Twitter are complaining about: that they aren't receiving proper exposure.

It seems like a fair deal to me, and for Twitter and FB to be complaining about lack of exposure when they're trying to charge for the data that would appropriately affect their ranking is what seems absurdly hypocritical to me.

twitter and facebook are big enough to complain. they dont need google right now, thay can stand on their own.

search for mark zuckerberg in google. Which is the first social network page that shows up in the search ranking(ranked by google based on publicly available data and its own click-thru data). Why dont they just show that page rather than the google-plus page, whose rank is probably so low it doesn't even show up in the organic search first 10 pages... I'm saying that the kind of click-thru data that google is asking for is private business-critical data. If google expects facebook/twitter to release that, that is akin to google being asked to release the click-data on all query/website combinations which forms the most critical signal in search ranking.

I'm saying it's fine for Twitter and FB to withhold that data. But they can't then complain about not being ranked fairly. Conversely, Google started off complaining about not getting access to FB and Twitter data. Then they shut up and made a competing product. FB and Twitter are free to do the same, but I think what Google has just showed is that it's a lot easier for Google to make a compelling social network than it is for FB or Twitter to make a compelling search engine. They're complaining because they're scared, and, quite frankly, they should be.

I honestly don't really see the downside to them opening their data to Google, though. They were in a better position before Google started G+. Google didn't want to make a social network. They just wanted the data. They had the open social initiative and were trying to make social networks interoperable, but FB and Twitter resisted. They sort of forced Google into the position of competing directly with them. Now they're complaining about it.

What really confuses me is what was the downside to them opening up to Google? (Esp. Twitter, who actually had a deal where they were getting paid for access to the firehose.) Google wasn't competing with them directly. In fact, Google was in a position to direct a lot of traffic to them.

The only thing I can imagine is that both FB and Twitter thought they were going to be able to obviate search and tried aggressively for that. I don't know why they thought Google would sit still for that, though.

:) no data is being witheld ! Both facebook.com/zuck and plus.google.com/zuck are public pages. As with all other docs in google's index, they should just use signals like click-data to decide which page shows up. This has nothing to do with private data or not getting access. That's just all PR bullshit.

Normal ranking algorithms apply normally. Social networking profiles have extra data, you know, like social activity and social graph, that Google doesn't have access to. The pages you're talking about already show up and are ranked normally like all other pages. G+ pages show up higher because they have a lot of extra google juice from social signals. Those are the ones Twitter and FB are complaining about.

Disclaimer 1: I work for Twitter. Disclaimer 2: Not a twitter spokesperson, opinions are my own.

I don't understand how so many people are missing the point demonstrated by http://www.focusontheuser.org/. It uses information available from Google search to inject twitter, facebook, etc results into the "your world (as long as it's google+)" module. The ranking it uses is Google's ranking of the relevant results. No special API access. No back-end deals. No money. It's stuff that's available to Google and that Google already has and has already ranked.

If they choose to dilute the worth of their search engine by injecting less-than-relevant (according to their own relevance algorithm) results in order to attempt to grow Plus (presumably hoping that'll ultimately increase the revenue to offset the losses on the search engine side of the business), they are perfectly within their rights to do so. Just don't buy their "oh we'd be happy to show more stuff but boo-hoo we don't have the data" line -- they totally have the data, and it doesn't require sweetheart deals. The only thing they can't do is grab your personal social graph and re-rank according to it. So they use something they know is sub-par (Plus's currently very partial graph) and don't bother dialing in relevance signals against their own best-in-the-world search engine.

It is true that Google rated them on top for 'Organic' results, but the use of following someone on Google+ is not just that you want to see what they publish (use it just like a social network). There is more to it, what they +1 and share has direct effect on how things are ranked for you in later queries. This information is not available for other cases - not realtime/easily anyways. (Twitter closed their hose, Facebook is tricky to parse and their APIs are incredibly slow!).

Not related to you, but I did some experimentation on my own and published it at: halfaclick.blogspot.com/2012/01/focus-on-thy-users.html. It is not that FB (contributors from where helped develop the FOTU) shows any more focus than Google.

Also the way Focus On The User portrayed the entire thing was not that they are giving a tool that makes Google better but that Google was not using their information. And why just Facebook, Twitter and MySpace? Why not HN, Quora, SO and others?