Social networks create tool to overcome Google bias to Google+

Google has come under fire from Facebook, Myspace and Twitter for an alleged unfair bias towards its Google+ service in search results.

The company recently updated its search listings to include more results from social networks, a move that followed hot on the heels of the launch of Google+.

Critics have said that results for profiles on Google+ are now appearing above Twitter and Facebook, even if they are less relevant. The results in question appear under a header 'People and pages on Google+', but critics still say this gives biased results.

Now, a group of engineers from Facebook, Myspace and Twitter have created a special tool to show users the results they believe Google should be showing. The tool, also called a bookmarklet, runs in a browser and is called ‘don't be evil'.

The name is a play on one of Google's key philosophies, that you can make money without "doing evil".

On the website for the Focus on the User project, engineers explained that the bookmarklet used Google's own search algorithms to deliver more accurate results. The project is also open source and anyone with an interest can look at the code.

"We created a tool that uses Google's own relevance measure – the ranking of their organic search results – to determine what social content should appear in the areas where Google+ results are currently hardcoded."

The project alters the results Google delivers for searches relating to social networks. When it finds a social result, the tool will "google Google" to find the most relevant result.

Explaining an example of this on its website, Focus on the User said when Google focused purely on relevance it got it right, but that Google+ was skewing the results.

"When you search for 'cooking' today, Google decides that renowned chef Jamie Oliver is a relevant social result. That makes sense. But rather than linking to Jamie's Twitter profile, which is updated daily, Google links to his Google+ profile, which was last updated nearly two months ago."

At present the tool will only work on search results in the United States where the latest ‘social' version of Google.com is available.