Facebook, Twitter, MySpace create social search tool

Following complaints that Google’s new social search tool gives skewed results instead of the most relevant ones, a group of social networks have banded together to offer an alternative.

Engineers at Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace created a proof of concept that lets people use Google to get search results from those sites as well as LinkedIn, Flickr, Quora, Tumblr, Foursquare, Crunchbase, FriendFeed, Stack Overflow, Github, and Google+. The results show the highest social media results for a given search and not just the Google+ results that Google’s new Search Plus Your World does.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57364111-93/facebook-twitter-myspace-create-social-search-tool/

Dubbed “don’t be evil” in reference to Google’s much-maligned motto, the tool is a browser bookmarklet, or small piece of code, that runs in Chrome, FireFox, or Safari, but not Internet Explorer. When you do a search, the software automatically checks Google for the social profiles associated with a search query typed into the search engine and replaces the Google+ profiles that Google now features with the ones ranked highest in its own search results.

A battle is brewing.