Cool site shows what Google’s social search should really be like

Blake Ross, who is currently director of product at Facebook has just launched a new project in collaboration with  Tom Occhino (developer at Facebook) and Marshall Roch to show Google up by demonstrating what its social search feature is really capable of.

Google is currently defending its position to prioritise Google+ results in social search, as they claim they are restricted from indexing certain content from other social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. As Ross as shown with his site ‘focus on the user’ however, this seems to be untrue. Focus On The User presents search results with a number of other social sources, and the developers claim they never show content that isn’t already indexed by Google.

You can test the site for yourself by easily installing the button on your toolbar (found on the site here). Also check out this demo that the team put together:

The effect of the addon can be seen in the example below. The first search shows the standard Google results when searching for ‘cooking’, with Google+ profiles clearly displayed prominently on the right:

When the ‘don’t be evil’ bookmark is pressed, the results differ significantly:

I know which version of Google I’d rather have.

The war is on

While this project is exciting enough as it calls Google out completely on what they have deemed relevant social results, but even more so given that it’s come from within Facebook. Since the release of Google+, rivalry between the two has been escalating and now Facebook is getting involved in what isn’t even its native area: search, and showing that they can do it better.

And it gets a little more interesting as the site claims that developers from Twitter and Myspace were also involved in building the site. Google versus one social network is one thing, but Google versus a team of networks is another, and this may be the first real example we’ve seen where Google has taken its monopoly too far.