Twitter’s Alex Macgillivray has warned that Google’s highlighting of Google+ in search results is a ‘bad day for the internet’, and says that he imagines there was likely controversy within Google itself at the move. Google launched the Search Plus Your World move on Tuesday.
Google has started to highlight results from Google+ in certain search results in the US, and is expected to roll the change out worldwide soon. Critics argue that this will discourage Google+ users from seeking results from outside the network, although others argue that this is really not very different from the time when Twitter results were similarly highlighted.
Google has already responded to the criticism, noting that Twitter didn’t renew their search agreement a while back. And to be fair, it’s true that Google has a hard time crawling social search results from networks other than Google+, which means that the company could perhaps argue that it would like to include Twitter and Facebook results if it were allowed to do so.
Alex Macgillivray isn’t the only one to have cast doubt on Google’s change. Danny Sullivan has raised trust issues, while MG Siegler has suggested that serious questions have to be asked about the change. It looks like there could be some serious ‘discussions’ over the next few months, and one wonders whether Twitter will start to regret ending its search deal with Google.
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