Google Search Shift Draws Critics
Earlier this month, Google made a change to its search engine that drew quite a bit of criticism, but also added a lot of potential for the search giant. This change may seem minor on the surface, but drastically changes the landscape for social media, and in the long run, could be a big boost for Google, and a big problem for other social sites like Facebook and Twitter. Here’s what happened, and why this might be bad news.
Last summer, Google launched its own social network, Google Plus, with the hope of becoming a big player in the growing industry. They had, and still have, a lot of ambition for it, and even went so far to say that Google Plus would become what all of the company was centered around. It started off nicely, but there’s no question that it’s still no where near the size of Facebook, the current top player.
In fact, it’s hard to see Google Plus gaining the upper hand any time soon, simply because people are used to the systems they currently are on. So now, Google decided to put their social network front and center. With the new change, when you do a search on Google about almost anything, you get a new area on the right side that lists a number of people on Google Plus that talks about the subject you searched for. As an example, if you look for “cars”, you get a list of car companies that have Google Plus pages. If you look for “Britney Spears”, you get her page on Google Plus.
But this has a lot of problems. First, the search results we get from Google have always been neutral, meaning that what you see on top is what the whole web thinks is the best resources available. Even YouTube videos, a company owned by Google, are typically mixed in with videos from other sites. But now, on the social front, Google is showing us their own offerings, and nothing else.
This is bad news for both users and competing companies. The fact is if you really want social news about cars, those Google Plus pages may not be the best place on the web. And Britney Spears? She shares a lot more information on Facebook and Twitter than on her Google Plus account. Yet, users don’t get to see that, because now Google is showing biased results. Of course, competing social networks must be furious of being excluded like that.
In truth, Google is a private company, and if they want to push their own products, they have the right to do so. At least, unless you think of them as a monopoly. And at 65% market share in the US, and near 90% in some Europe countries, it’s pretty close to being one. Still, whether it’s legal or not, it’s just bad for the web to have biased search results.
