Shortly after Google announced "Search plus Your World," their latest endeavor to incorporate social into traditional search, Twitter took to the Internet world to vent some concerns and criticisms about the search engine powerhouse.
Here is Twitter's full statement:
"For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results anytime they wanted to find something on the Internet.
Often, they want to know more about world events and breaking news. Twitter has emerged as a vital source of this real-time information, with more than 100 million users sending 250 million Tweets every day on virtually every topic. As we've seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter; as a result, Twitter accounts and Tweets are often the most relevant results.
We're concerned that as a result of Google's changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that's bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users."
Google explains in their blog that "Search plus Your World" will provide a more personal search experience with the integration of social content.
The only issue is that Google's social network, Google+, is the only social network involved in this update.
How does "Search plus Your World" work?
Twitter understands the impact these changes in Google search can potentially have on traffic.
Google combated Twitter's claims explaining that their reasons for not including other search engines wasn't due to bias but due to privacy issues, an inability to crawl content on other social networks and limited real-time APIs.
"The key thing here is we only have access to content on Google. We're open to other types of content, but in order to provide secure and consistent access, we can only provide what's in Google, where we know the privacy settings and have the relevant graph and signals," said Google Fellow, Ben Gomes. (via AllThingsD)
Proving how quickly some relationships can go sour, Google reminded Twitter of their previous partnership, Google Realtime Search. This feature displayed relevant Twitter updates that related to your search.
Google updated their Google+ account with this:
"We are a bit surprised by Twitter's comments about Search plus Your World, because they chose not to renew their agreement with us last summer (http://goo.gl/chKwi), and since then we have observed their rel=nofollow instructions."
Users can only access "Search plus Your World" by logging into their Google or Google+ accounts, these features officially launched yesterday in English. The option to opt out is available in Google settings.
What do you think of "Search plus Your World" - is this an attempt at self-promotion on Google's end? Or is Twitter overreacting?
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