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Tag: Focus On The User

  • Google Rivals Launch ‘Focus On The User’ Site

    Google Rivals Launch ‘Focus On The User’ Site

    Another group of Google rival companies (separate from FairSearch) has sprung up with a new site aimed at shaping the EU opinion on Google’s business practices when it comes to competition.

    The site is called “Focus on the User,” and the companies/organizations involved are: Yelp, Consumer Watchdog, Jameda, HolidayCheck, TripAdvisor, and Fight for the Future.

    Here’s an excerpt from the info you’ll be fed on this site:

    You might think that Google gives you the best answers from across the web when you search for something as important as a pediatrician in Munich, a bicycle repair shop in Copenhagen, or a hotel in Madrid. But Google doesn’t actually use its normal organic search algorithm to produce the responses to this question that you see prominently on the first screen. Instead, it promotes a more limited set of results drawn from Google+ ahead of the more relevant ones you would get from using Google’s organic search algorithm.

    The European Commission is weighing its options to ensure that consumers searching using Google can access all websites, not just content powered by Google+. We think the best way to do that is using Google’s own organic search algorithm to identify the most relevant results — regardless of their source — from across the web.

    So it’s pretty much stuff you’ve heard before,but don’t worry, it goes on and on from there. This time they have a “tool” to demonstrate their point.

    In our internal testing, it looks like searches for “yelp” and “tripadvisor” do return results for those respecitve sites and their respective apps.

    Via Re/code

    Image via Focus on the User

  • Focus On The User: Facebook, Twitter & Myspace’s Version Of Google

    Facebook Director of Product Blake Ross has created a bookmarklet that people can add to their web browsers to take the “Search Plus Your World” out of their Google search results. Granted, Google has its own toggle to turn the feature on and off from the search results page, but this goes further.

    First, here’s a video about it:

    On FocusOnTheUser.org, where you can get the bookmarklet, it says, “This proof of concept was built by some engineers at Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, in consultation with several other social networking companies. We are open-sourcing the code so that anyone may use it or make it even better.”

    John Battelle has a bit more of the story, however, after visiting Facebook’s offices. He talked to Ross, who is one of the creators of Firefox. Battelle writes, “It was a simple hack, he said, some code he had thrown together in response to the whole Google+ tempest.”

    “After Blake showed me his work, we had a lively discussion about the implications of Facebook actually releasing such a tool,” writes Battelle. “I mean, it’s one thing for a lone hacktivist to do this, it’s quite another for a member of the Internet Big Five to publicly call Google out. Facebook would need to vet this with legal, with management (this clearly had to pass muster with Mark Zuckerberg), and, I was told, Facebook wanted to reach out to others – such as Twitter – and get their input as well.”

    Apparently that strategy went through, since Twitter and MySpace are also getting some credit.

    The bookmarket actually says “Don’t Be Evil,” a reference to Google’s proclaimed philosophy.

    Don't Be Evil

    An interesting snippet from the FAQ page at FocusOnTheUser.org:

    Q: I thought Google needed a deal and more info from social sites to integrate them into its new social features?

    A: This is clearly not true. The bookmarklet never accesses any server or API outside of google.com. The information has already been indexed and ranked by Google.

    Focus on the User

    Do you think the bookmarklet makes Google’s results better? Better than Google’s own toggle? Let us know what you think in the comments.