In defense of Google. And, more importantly, the user.
MG is pretty angry. And I understand why. Google’s Search+ (or “Search plus Your World”, apparently) seems to be a blatant attempt to push a product that would otherwise have very little traction, by leveraging an industry in which they have almost a monopoly; web search. The truth is, though, that the functionality is awesome. We all know very well that social context is the next revolution in web search, and for Google to ignore that would be their downfall. It’s the reason I’m calling out Facebook and Microsoft for being stupid and not doing the same thing, within Bing, a long time ago. No; the issue isn’t the functionality - it’s the fact that it’s Google’s own product that is being pushed. And the reason that is the case is equally simple - Google are building this functionality with what they have access to. Matt Cutts just took the time to explain what it is that Google is exposing through the new feature, which includes public content outside of Google+. Is this is a bit of a “fuck you” to Twitter, who decided to end their agreement with Google last year? Of course. They’ve essentially just strong-armed Twitter and Facebook into exposing their services to be fully crawlable by Google. And that is going to make for a fantastic search experience for all of us.
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