Facebook and Twitter engineers launch ‘fairer’ version of Google -
Snubbed Facebook and Twitter engineers are trying to teach Google a lesson in fairness.
Google this month created a new search tool on its site. Search Plus scours the Internet through Google and Google Plus.
Which means it leaves out the world’s most popular social-networking sites: Facebook and Twitter.
No fair, said a group describing themselves as “some engineers at Facebook, Twitter and MySpace and in consultation with several other social networking companies.”
To fight back, they created a “proof of concept” site called Focusontheuser.org .
“How much better would social search be if Google surfaced results from all across the web?” the site says on its home page.
“We created a tool that uses Google’s own relevance measure — the ranking of their organic search results — to determine what social content should appear in the areas where Google+ results are currently hardcoded.”
The site explains: If you search on the word “cooking,” Google decides celebrity chef Jamie Oliver is what you want, but with a link to his inactive Google Plus site, rather than his very active Twitter site.
“Is Google’s relevance algorithm simply misguided?” the Focusontheuser engineers ask.
If you search the name “Jamie Oliver” on Google, his Twitter profile comes up first and his Google Plus profile isn’t even on the first page.
“When Google’s engineers are allowed to focus purely on relevancy, they get it right,” declare the Focusontheuser engineers.
Read more -
http://www.thestar.com/business/article/1120190--facebook-and-twitter-engineers-launch-fairer-version-of-google?bn=1
Snubbed Facebook and Twitter engineers are trying to teach Google a lesson in fairness.
Google this month created a new search tool on its site. Search Plus scours the Internet through Google and Google Plus.
Which means it leaves out the world’s most popular social-networking sites: Facebook and Twitter.
No fair, said a group describing themselves as “some engineers at Facebook, Twitter and MySpace and in consultation with several other social networking companies.”
To fight back, they created a “proof of concept” site called Focusontheuser.org .
“How much better would social search be if Google surfaced results from all across the web?” the site says on its home page.
“We created a tool that uses Google’s own relevance measure — the ranking of their organic search results — to determine what social content should appear in the areas where Google+ results are currently hardcoded.”
The site explains: If you search on the word “cooking,” Google decides celebrity chef Jamie Oliver is what you want, but with a link to his inactive Google Plus site, rather than his very active Twitter site.
“Is Google’s relevance algorithm simply misguided?” the Focusontheuser engineers ask.
If you search the name “Jamie Oliver” on Google, his Twitter profile comes up first and his Google Plus profile isn’t even on the first page.
“When Google’s engineers are allowed to focus purely on relevancy, they get it right,” declare the Focusontheuser engineers.
Read more -
http://www.thestar.com/business/article/1120190--facebook-and-twitter-engineers-launch-fairer-version-of-google?bn=1
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