Does Google’s Venture into Social Media Present a Conflict of Interest?

There has been a lot of controversy over the past few weeks surrounding the latest update to Google’s “Search Plus Your World” tool.  This fairly new feature is intended to integrate social networking profiles, people, and pages into general web searches, bringing “your world” (the world of the user) together with the things that are searched.  The social results, including personal connections like friends and posts made by people you know, are displayed alongside web results as quick links to jump to that particular social network page and are meant to be the most relevant results to your query.

However, it appears that this tool is clearly biased in favor of Google+ results, as opposed to other social sites, according to developers from three competing social networks: Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook.  The argument is that when searching for topics via Google, social results appear that mostly (if not always) favor Google+ profiles and pages, even if that is not the most relevant social site.  

One example highlighted by Jordan Kahn of 9to5google.com is that when searching for “cooking,”  the top social result is the Google+ profile of Chef Jamie Oliver, whose page has no new posts since early December; while Jamie’s Facebook and Twitter profiles are in fact much more current (and thus would be a better fit for the user’s search).  The engineers from the aforementioned social networks have even collaborated to create a bookmarklet called “Don’t Be Evil,” a jab at Google since that is the company’s own unofficial motto.  The bookmarklet is available for free for anyone wanting to disable this bias.  When used with the previous example, “cooking,” the Google “Search Plus Your World” feature is disallowed from skewing search results, yielding a very different list of relevant social pages.  In fact, the top social result is Jamie Oliver’s Twitter profile, which has 1.8 million followers, ten times the amount circles in his Google+ profile.

We have been, and remain, fans of Google – but one of our favorite things about this lovable and cuddly global mega-corporation has been that they generally use their absurd level of power to do good things that help the world and make our lives easier (by contrast with other empires such as Microsoft, who uses their power to make our programmers miserable with a disregard for web standards compliance, but I digress...).

So, in this case, is Google compromising its own integrity in order to make money?  If so, what does this mean for those of us who are banking on Google’s basic goodness since we rely on them for so many tools we can’t live without?

Fundamentally, Google has achieved their level of dominance because they serve the user better than any other search tool – and unbiased results is a cornerstone of that service.  Larry Page was quoted as saying, “Focus on the user and all else will follow.”  Google’s credibility is compromised when they present a bias toward results that will benefit them.  A misstep here or there won’t derail their market leadership – but over time, if such episodes continue, users will move on.  

To quote another larger-than-life icon, Spiderman once said: “With great power comes great responsibility.”  Well, at least I think it was Spiderman.  Voltaire?  I can’t really be certain.  Google gave me some mixed signals in their results...

Amber Douglas
Social Media Account Manager