Facebook Mocks Google with ‘Don’t be Evil’ Plug-in

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The social media world is buzzing with news of a ‘Don’t be Evil’ plug-in extension created by engineers at Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace that, by, it’s name is a derisive dig aimed squarely at Google’s departure from its initial company values when it launched in 1996 by Stanford students Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

‘Don’t be Evil’ is an informal motto that evolved from Google’s corporate culture of making money without doing evil, or diverging from one’s core philosophy and values in order to make money.  In recent years the search engine giant has clearly not adhered to this admirable philosophy, as evidenced by the recent uproar over its recent Search Plus  Your World Offering (SPYW), which weights its search results heavily in favor of Google+ and even excludes results for its main rivals Facebook and Twitter.

Google is no longer a neutral directory of the whole democratic web with a primary mission of helping users find the information they want as quickly as possible. The ‘Don’t be Evil’ plug-in addresses this problem, and maybe it will prod the search engine giant to recall its core values.

The ‘Don’t be Evil’ plug-in uses Google’s search algorithm to tweak the SPYW results in order to find the most relevant social media posts in search results, the people and pages showcase box, and the auto-complete box, the three main places Google+ shows results.  The code for the plug-in alters these elements in order to serve up the most relevant social media results, and not the results Google+ would like you to see.  Google+ results do sometimes come up as the first hit, but in many others instances, the other social media websites are coming up first, with social media content like an ongoing highly followed Twitter feed, a Flickr album enjoying heavy traffic, or the Facebook page for a fading celebrity.

The developers of the Don’t Be Evil plug-in, which is not an official product of Facebook, Twitter, or MySpace, said on their website, “focus on the user”, they aim to show that Google+ search results on general terms like “music” or “movies” incorrectly prioritize in favor of Google+, over content that is more relevant to the query. The engineers explain on the website: “Often these results are irrelevant for users, such as when Google links to Mark Zuckerberg’s empty Google+ profile.”

Google announced its new SPYW search feature on January 10^th and has since been severely criticized by its competitors (led by Twitter), industry observers, and users alike. The ‘Don’t be Evil” plug-in is the latest salvo in an ongoing outcry in the Internet world over Google’s direction with search. Twitter’s public relation team released a statement shortly after SPYW was announced essentially charging Google has released a product that makes it more difficult to find what you want on the Web:

“For  years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results anytime they wanted to find something on the Internet. We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes finding the information will be much harder for everyone.”

Google quickly countered this charge claiming that it has previously tried to make business arrangements with Twitter and Facebook so that their search results will show up in Google+. The engineers who made the “Don’t be Evil Plug-in” say obviously  business agreements are not needed between companies because they have made a plug-in that serves up the most relevant results using Google’s own data.

A Q&A on the FAQ section of the Focus on the User website says, in response to this question – “I thought Google needed a deal and more info from social sites to integrate them into new social features”:

“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.”

Users who want to get the “Don’t be evil” plug-in can go to www.focusontheuser.org, click on the blue “Try a more relevant Google” button, and follow the three step instructions. The plug-in is available for Firefox, Chrome, and Safari web browsers.