If Focus on the User really doesn't want to be "evil" and you want to "focus on the user" then the plugin needs to be changed. The edits the plugin makes are better, but it just looks like Facebook/Twitter are just making sure they get their websites mentioned. It appears they are not focused on the user, but focused on how it will help them.
Here are some major suggestions:
1. If someone searches for cars in Google, 95% of the time they are looking to either research cars, buy a car, or the movie Cars. First of all do you honestly feel that Ferrari's facebook or google+ page is more relevant/useful than the websites of CarsDirect, Edmunds, or MotorTrend? The Google+/Facebook pages are more prominent than these websites. That makes zero sense. I don't know if you can do this, but if possible the "People and Pages" section should be removed. If not, see #2.
2. Why would the first result be Ferrari's facebook page in this search over Ferrari's own web site?
3. The Autosuggestion thing should work the same way as above. When I search for Matt Cutts I am not looking for either his Facebook or his Google Plus page, the most relevant result would be mattcutts.com, no? Or just remove the autosuggestion thing period. Assuming that I want to go see Matt Cutts Facebook profile over his Google+ profile is silly.
4. Make it so that you can actually remove Google+ results period. When I search for NFC Championship Game I don't care to see that MG Siegler went to that game. Nor would I want to see that on facebook either. It just ideally would be removed.
As I see it, the code that adds social networking links to people in the right side-bar (which is probably the most prominent feature of the bookmarklet) depends on the G+ profile being there.
So Google has their own algorithms to, say, connect Yehuda Katz with a search query for "ruby". This means that the plugin only finds ruby people who also have a G+ profile and then adds links to other services too.
Now for this to be really useful, it should find people even if they don't have a G+ profile and that is what I wonder whether it's even possible by just crawling the web to the extent allowed by the various services.
Adding other Social Networking links to already determined Google+ profiles is not interesting. Finding people on Twitter related to a search term regardless of whether they have a G+ profile or not is the interesting part.
AFAIK Google only has access to the public information that it can gather by scraping those websites (which isn't an easy feat at all, given the frequency of updates) or using the public APIs, that only give you a limited amount of information.
Until last Summer, Twitter had a contract with Google to give the latter its firehose stream, with all its tweets in real time. AFAIK, it was Twitter that decided not to renew that contract, evidently because they thought they could monetize that information better without Google. But now, apparently, they want their cake and eat it too...
> Google has access to the same information about other social profiles that it does about its own profiles, as the tool on the site demonstrates.
Does it demonstrate that? It's more likely that those profiles just show up because of the normal page rank algorithm (eg Jamie Oliver's twitter account ranks highly because so many people link to it). It is a reasonable proxy for popularity for popular people, at least, though there's probably too much noise before you get too far down the long tail. But it isn't the same thing that the OP was talking about.
I actually think it would be cool if google took the more Open Social approach by taking the sites I list in my profile as mine, looked at my friends and frequency of posting where available (more twitter than facebook), and then biased my results to favor my preferred networks. I don't know if it would end up with great results, but it could be an interesting separate tool, perhaps.
Comments
You don't have to guess how well such a service would work. It has been built and is available on the site.
Google has access to the same information about other social profiles that it does about its own profiles, as the tool on the site demonstrates.
Blake:
If Focus on the User really doesn't want to be "evil" and you want to "focus on the user" then the plugin needs to be changed. The edits the plugin makes are better, but it just looks like Facebook/Twitter are just making sure they get their websites mentioned. It appears they are not focused on the user, but focused on how it will help them.
Here are some major suggestions:
1. If someone searches for cars in Google, 95% of the time they are looking to either research cars, buy a car, or the movie Cars. First of all do you honestly feel that Ferrari's facebook or google+ page is more relevant/useful than the websites of CarsDirect, Edmunds, or MotorTrend? The Google+/Facebook pages are more prominent than these websites. That makes zero sense. I don't know if you can do this, but if possible the "People and Pages" section should be removed. If not, see #2.
2. Why would the first result be Ferrari's facebook page in this search over Ferrari's own web site?
3. The Autosuggestion thing should work the same way as above. When I search for Matt Cutts I am not looking for either his Facebook or his Google Plus page, the most relevant result would be mattcutts.com, no? Or just remove the autosuggestion thing period. Assuming that I want to go see Matt Cutts Facebook profile over his Google+ profile is silly.
4. Make it so that you can actually remove Google+ results period. When I search for NFC Championship Game I don't care to see that MG Siegler went to that game. Nor would I want to see that on facebook either. It just ideally would be removed.
As I see it, the code that adds social networking links to people in the right side-bar (which is probably the most prominent feature of the bookmarklet) depends on the G+ profile being there.
So Google has their own algorithms to, say, connect Yehuda Katz with a search query for "ruby". This means that the plugin only finds ruby people who also have a G+ profile and then adds links to other services too.
Now for this to be really useful, it should find people even if they don't have a G+ profile and that is what I wonder whether it's even possible by just crawling the web to the extent allowed by the various services.
Adding other Social Networking links to already determined Google+ profiles is not interesting. Finding people on Twitter related to a search term regardless of whether they have a G+ profile or not is the interesting part.
AFAIK Google only has access to the public information that it can gather by scraping those websites (which isn't an easy feat at all, given the frequency of updates) or using the public APIs, that only give you a limited amount of information.
Until last Summer, Twitter had a contract with Google to give the latter its firehose stream, with all its tweets in real time. AFAIK, it was Twitter that decided not to renew that contract, evidently because they thought they could monetize that information better without Google. But now, apparently, they want their cake and eat it too...
> Google has access to the same information about other social profiles that it does about its own profiles, as the tool on the site demonstrates.
Does it demonstrate that? It's more likely that those profiles just show up because of the normal page rank algorithm (eg Jamie Oliver's twitter account ranks highly because so many people link to it). It is a reasonable proxy for popularity for popular people, at least, though there's probably too much noise before you get too far down the long tail. But it isn't the same thing that the OP was talking about.
I actually think it would be cool if google took the more Open Social approach by taking the sites I list in my profile as mine, looked at my friends and frequency of posting where available (more twitter than facebook), and then biased my results to favor my preferred networks. I don't know if it would end up with great results, but it could be an interesting separate tool, perhaps.