The controversy over Google’s Search Plus Your World (where they’re now showing Google+ results at the top of the page, irrespective of whether they really belong there or not) won’t go away. The FTC is likely going to get involved over Google’s use of its monopoly in search to promote other products (in this case Google+). It doesn’t surprise me that Google is trying to do this, but it’s causing a ton of uproar and discussion across the Internet.
Blake Ross (from Facebook) and a team of engineers from MySpace and Twitter hacked together a browser extension called focusontheuser that displays better Twitter and FB results in Google. It’s a quick demonstration, but a good example of how Google isn’t treating all results equally.
Yesterday, Wajam put out a quick video demonstrating its social search capabilities versus Google and focusontheuser. You can read their blog post and check out the video below:
Wajam is demonstrating its ability to grab friends’ data from across all social networks and provide that to you in the search results. This is significantly different than what Google is doing, and puts Wajam right in the middle of a growing storm around search and the value of social search. It should be interesting to watch how things transpire with Google and the big boys, and also to see how Wajam can react and benefit from the attention and turmoil in the space.
