Google’s launch of Search Plus Your World has been criticised by sites like Twitter. Search Plus Your World plans to use Google+ data in searching for information on people’s names that are usually difficult to find.
This means that looking for a certain John Smith will be easier to find rather than sifting through hundreds of links about John Smith. Google’s new search feature aims to make finding your particular John Smith easier.
Photos that have been shared on Google+ and Picasa will also appear in search results, but if users have marked it private it will only be available to them. Google results will be personalised automatically, drawing from Google+ circles.
This also means that data related to Google+ accounts will be featured first in its rankings, disregarding importance on relevance and quality of content.
In a statement released by Twitter the social networking site said:
"For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results anytime they wanted to find something on the Internet. Often, they want to know more about world events and breaking news. Twitter has emerged as a vital source of this real-time information, with more than 100 million users sending 250 million Tweets every day on virtually every topic. As we’ve seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter; as a result, Twitter accounts and Tweets are often the most relevant results. We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organisations and Twitter users."
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Yet, Google made it clear that it was not affected by Twitter’s statement and pointed out why the tweet search deal was not renewed.
"We are a bit surprised by Twitter’s comments about Search plus Your World, because they chose not to renew their agreement with us last summer and since then we have observed their rel=nofollow instructions."
This means that Twitter pages are not longer automatically rolled into search results since the two companies parted ways, which has Twitter in a very sour mood.
Admittedly, it’s very smart on Google’s part business-wise in promoting Google+ but the new search does knock down Google’s reputation of offering the most relevant top news and content.
Google+ is a latecomer into the social networking scene. Google seems to be using this as a way to throttle itself forward in an attempt to gain a foot above its competition with Facebook and Twitter.
This may not fare well among some Google+ users who may not want everything they do on a social networking site to impact their search engine results.
Google said on the company’s official blog that Search plus Your World is safe when it comes to private content and has a high standard of security and privacy:
"When it comes to security and privacy, we set a high bar for Search plus Your World. Since some of the information you’ll now find in search results, including Google+ posts and private photos, is already secured by SSL encryption Google+, we have decided that the results page should also have the same level of security and privacy protection. That’s part of why we were the first major search engine to turn on search via SSL by default for signed-in users last year. This means when you’re signed in to Google, your search results — including your private content — are protected by the same high standards of encryption as your messages in Gmail," the company said.
