24 January 2012 | Author: R Wood Media Intern

Social networks Focus on the User

Fed up with being ignored by Google, engineers from Facebook, Twitter and MySpace have joined forces to create a new tool that gleans search results from social networks other than Google+.

'Focus on the User' uses Google's algorithms to "determine what social content should appear in the areas where Google+ results are currently hardcoded."

By using the tool, users can see search results from Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, along with LinkedIn, Tumblr, Flickr, Foursquare, Crunchbase, FriendFeed and several other social networking sites across the web. Instead of automatically being met with Google+ results, users can see the most relevant social media results on any given search.

"When you search for 'cooking' today, Google decides that renowned chef Jamie Oliver is a relevant social result," the website said.

"That makes sense. But rather than linking to Jamie's Twitter profile, which is updated daily, Google links to his Google+ profile, which was updated nearly two months ago."

The bookmarklet - dubbed 'Don't be Evil', after Google's own motto - runs in Chrome, Firefox or Safari and automatically checks for any social profiles associated with a given search term, replacing Google+ profiles.

According to its creators, Focus on the User "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+."

Google's Search plus Your World update has come under fire since its launch, with critics arguing the search giant is acting in its own interests on its quest to become more social.

Dissidents of Search plus Your World have also called foul on Google, arguing Mountain View is not doing what's best for the user and is abusing its power by edging out other social networks from search results.

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