This is significant. Google claims it cannot show search results from other social networks in its new “Search Plus Your World”. The decision to only display pages from its own social network Google Plus in a special box along the top search results was much criticized: Are those really the most relevant social media entries Google can find? In this video, engineers from the excluded networks prove how easy it would be for Google to include other social media entries in their results.

futurejournalismproject:

When Developers Attack?

When Google launched Search Plus Your World it integrated social search into its results.

The big problem, as critics pointed out, was that social meant Google+ posts from your circles of friends and acquaintances. This diminished the integrity of search results as posts on Twitter, Facebook and other social networks that might be much more relevant to the original query were ignored.

Google’s response was that Twitter and Facebook don’t give the search engine access to their data so they moved forward with what they could do, namely include Google+ results.

But last weekend developers from Facebook, Twitter and Myspace got together for a hackathon to demonstrate that Google’s excuse is just that, an excuse that isn’t really true. In doing so, they created a site called Focus on the User that includes bookmarklets for Safari, Chrome and Firefox that expands Google search to include other social networks.

The video above gives background to all this and shows how its done.

ZDNet explains things further.

(Source: futurejournalismproject)