Google+ searches for the winning formula

Google announced in a blog post yesterday that it started including Google+ data in Google search results. Calling it Search, Plus your world, Google made its biggest move to propel Google+ into the bigtime. Like all things in the technology world, and especially when it involves Google, everybody weighs in. So they did.

Twitter, the 140-character sensation, felt it was unfair to include Google+ results in Google search as that would keep people away from Twitter’s real-time results. A chain of responses followed and it is now full scale web sensation clouding the most talked about CES 2012.

Was Google wrong?

In politics it’s called nepotism. In the technology world it’s called antitrust. Plain and simple.

It’s the act of using a product or a service to promote another product to gain competitive advantage. Microsoft has used its Windows operating system’s popularity, by bundling Internet Explorer to gain browser market share. Everybody called its bluff and Microsoft ended up in the soup.

The same story is repeating now. Or so they think. Only in this case Google is using a widely used web service to promote another web service to make it popular. The only twist is, Google wants to include Tweets and Facebook posts in its web results to serve you better. However, neither Twitter nor Facebook allowed Google to crawl deeply to provide meaningful results. Google had no choice but to use its own social network.

Honestly this is the only way Google could get a foothold in the social pie which is dominated by Facebook and Twitter.

Google has made it clear that it will present results from other social networks only if they allow Google to crawl.

It is tantamount to the crazy thought of Microsoft bundling Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer along with its Windows OS.

If Twitter and Facebook are fretting about losing traffic to this ‘evil’ move by Google, then they should open their dear data, let Google crawl, and maybe wait for the Facebook status updates and tweets to show up on the venerable search engine results page.

To all the privacy enthusiasts, isn’t it better to have your data in more than one company’s hands?

I can only see good things coming out of this :

• Facebook and Twitter will eventually open up its data to appear on Google results, which would give a real meaning to search plus your world.
• Facebook would just increase its search efforts and together with Microsoft and Bing will provide a competitive search engine. Anyway it’s a win-win for the users.

If a web service can’t talk to another web service then it is tightly coupled and poorly designed. If a web service talks to another web service, then it’s antitrust. What a Web.

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