Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace join forces to challenge Google Search’s favoritism

A few weeks ago, Google’s “Search, plus your world” initiative began prioritizing Google+ search results over rival social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. The move didn’t go unnoticed, and Twitter was quick to criticize. One member of the Twitter team even called the self-promotional move a “bad day for the Internet.” But today some engineers over at Facebook decided to take matters into their own hands with a bookmarklet they’re calling “Focus on the User.” The newly created bookmarklet gives users access to Google’s popular search algorithms and, significantly, calls up the most popular social results, regardless of their source. That means the likes of Twitter, Facebook, and Myspace won’t get lost in the shuffle.

As MG Siegler puts it, “In other words, it makes the new Google behave more like the old Google.”

How much better would social search be if Google surfaced results from all across the web?”…“The results speak for themselves. 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.

Google’s motivation is hardly a mystery, and it rhymes with “elfishness.” Clearly they want their search engine to be better than the competition, and to drive search engine traffic toward their own social platform, Google+. But it’s unacceptable, not to mention hypocritical, to censor results. Moral objections aside, such a move could pose serious anti-trust problems for Google, which thoroughly dominates the search market.

In the meantime, if you’d like to pull the blinders off your Google search experience, this bookmarklet should help.