Google and Twitter have become embroiled in a war of words over the search engine’s new “your world” update, which has raised concerns that it would over-emphasise Google’s own social network over its rivals.
Twitter’s general counsel lobbed the first verbal grenade on Tuesday by calling Google’s decision to incorporate more elements from Google+ into search results a “bad day for the internet”:
A statement from Twitter said that it was “concerned that as a result of Google’s changes”, finding tweets and Twitter accounts, especially around breaking news “will be much harder for everyone” because Google+ will be emphasised (there was no mention of any other social network in Google’s original blog post announcing the changes). “We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users,” it said.
Google responded using its official Google+ account to say it was “surprised by Twitter’s comments about Search plus Your World, because they chose not to renew their agreement with us last summer”. A couple of years ago, Twitter struck deals with both Google and Microsoft’s Bing but only the latter was renewed when they both expired last year, effectively ending Google’s “real time search” feature.
Since then, Google has been unable to index tweets with links in them, which had previously been the higher-ranking elements of Twitter’s service, although it still holds billions of results from Twitter in its index.
The same lockout is true for Facebook, which Google accuses of gradually raising its “walled garden” against its indexing spiders.
Eric Schmidt – whose 2004 vision of a “Google that knows you” is coming closer to fulfilment with the latest changes – told Marketing Land on Tuesday night that Google was still open to conversations with Twitter and Facebook.
He also denied that the new search results favour Google+. That’s hard to square with comments in Google’s blogpost yesterday, which said content from its own social network would appear prominently at the top-right of the results page, which is usually reserved for ads:
“Starting today, if you search for a topic like [music] or [baseball], you might see prominent people who frequently discuss this topic on Google+ appearing on the right-hand side of the results page.”
Prioritisation is a particularly sensitive issue for Google at a time when European Commission regulators are still considering their decision over allegations of discrimination in search results. Several commentators have queried whether the “Your World” update creates antitrust issues for Google.
Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search quality, indirectly addressed this in a recent post to his personal blog, noting:
Search plus Your World does surface public content from the open web, not just content from Google+…. Search plus Your World builds on the social search that we launched in 2009, and can surface public content from sites across from the web, such as Quora, FriendFeed, LiveJournal, Twitter, and WordPress.
Twitter has yet to comment on Google’s claim that it walked away from the negotiations. But the elephant in the room is Facebook, which was not even mentioned by Mr Cutts’ post and has not yet entered the fray.
This may seem like a public spat but it’s critical to all sides. Google needs social data as consumers spend more time on Facebook and Twitter, or risk becoming less relevant, but Twitter in particular, which still lags Facebook in user numbers by a large margin, does not want to be thrown down the search rankings at the expense of Google+.
Expect further developments soon.
