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Focus on the User

January 26th

Faye

Since the launch of Search plus Your World, Google has increasingly come under fire for acting in its own best interests and edging out other social networks from its search results.

So much so that engineers from Facebook, Twitter and MySpace have teamed up to create a new tool, or bookmarklet called ‘Focus on the User‘. by using this tool, which runs in chrome, Firefox or Safari. Users can see search results from a wide range of social networking sites from LinkedIn to Crunchbase instead of being automatically met with Google+ results.

How it works:

The bookmarklet’s creators had this to say on how it works

When you search for “cooking” today, Google decides that renowned chef Jamie Oliver is a relevant social result. That makes sense. But rather than linking to Jamie’s Twitter profile, which is updated daily, Google links to his Google+ profile, which was last updated nearly two months ago. Is Google’s relevance algorithm simply misguided?

No. If you search Google for Jamie Oliver directly, his Twitter profile is the first social result that appears. His abandoned Google+ profile doesn’t even appear on the first page of results. When Google’s engineers are allowed to focus purely on relevancy, they get it right.

So that’s what our “bookmarklet” does. It looks at the three places where Google only shows Google+ results and then automatically googles Google to see if Google finds a result more relevant than Google+