Twitter, where your account can be managed by Tweet Adder, Facebook and MySpace have all teamed up to produce an add on to remove the effects of the “search plus your world” update to Google. Engineers from the three companies helped out developers at Firefox to produce an add on which removes the effects of the new update.
The “Search Plus Your World” update boosts the profile of Google’s own social network G+ in its search engine result pages, which Twitter, Facebook and MySpace all feel will unfairly promote G+ above their social networks. Protesting against the latest update, Twitter, where your account can be maintained by Tweet Adder, sent out the following statement:
“For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results anytime they wanted to find something on the Internet. Often, they want to know more about world events and breaking news. Twitter has emerged as a vital source of this real-time information, with more than 100 million users sending 250 million Tweets every day on virtually every topic. As we’ve seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter; as a result, Twitter accounts and Tweets are often the most relevant results. We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users.”
Google then replied with a statement of their own which has started a war of words between the two companies. Google stated that Twitter hadn’t renewed an agreement with the search engine last summer and were “surprised” by Twitter’s remarks. Twitter and Facebook have agreements in place with Bing for how Microsoft’s search engine indexing their websites, but Google looks more focused on promoting its own social network to boost revenue, which has put them in direct conflict with both Twitter and Facebook. It will be interesting to see whether the “Don’t Be Evil” add on for Firefox catches on.
