Google Search + Your World = Microsoft-y Move

January 11th, 2012

Google is rolling out “Search plus Your World” which sprinkles results culled from your Google+ friends.

From the recent biography, Steve Jobs on Google:

“Figure out what Google wants to be when it grows up. What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest because they’re dragging you down. They’re turning you into Microsoft.”

Someone at Google has taken that advice to heart — over the past year, unwanted products have been dropped, righting the Titanic away from a giant iceberg named Facebook. It’s the Internet memo all over again, with Google+ the equivalent of IE.

And with “Search plus Your World” we have something that frankly, whiffs of Microsoft bundling Internet Explorer in Windows and sticking it deep into the OS. Which (IMHO deservedly), sparked the interest of the Federal Government.

I don’t think linking Google+ and search = anticompetitive is that much of a stretch. There’s an entire industry built around getting high rankings in Google search results. Now there’s a huge incentive for people to use Google+ to juice those results. And the feds are currently prodding those results with a fairly big stick.

Looking through things with that filter defines my opinion about this whole thing:

• During the IE vs. Netscape days I was a die-hard Mac user, so you can infer whose side I supported.
• If Google+ were some small scrappy startup (like FriendFeed was) and getting users based on a killer product — I’d support them. Maybe even use the product out of principle alone.
• Rooting for Google — a huge company with its fingers in just about everything (search, browsers, Internet, mobile, television) is fast becoming the equivalent of rooting for the Microsoft of the late nineties.

In a sick way, this situation may actually drive me to use Twitter and Facebook more (despite not being a Facebook fan). Recall Steve Jobs’ thoughts on Facebook:

“We talk about social networks in the plural, but I don’t see anybody other than Facebook out there,” Jobs told biographer Walter Isaacson in excerpts of an interview released online by “60 Minutes,” the CBS television show. “Just Facebook, they’re dominating this.”

“I admire Mark Zuckerberg,” Jobs said of Facebook’s chief executive officer on the recording. “I only know him a little bit, but I admire him for not selling out, for wanting to make a company. I admire that, a lot.”

At the time I read this, it was a little scary, but now in light of Google plus Your World I’m inclined to support the iceberg.

Note: And ultimately: is this search plus results from a social network something we really want, anyhow? I still remember my first visit to Google way back when and two things made it immediately clear that it was a superior product: fast, accurate search results and a super clean interface — words on stark white, in direct contrast to other cluttered search engines littered with ads. “Enhancing” my searches with LOLcats, artsy photographs, optical illusions, and social media nonsense (what’s in my Google+ streams these days) seems pretty far from those original reasons.