You have to wonder what Google was thinking when it launched ‘Search Plus Your World’ that has left many in the internet and social networking worlds aghast. Either way, it seems in their own time engineers at Facebook, Twitter and MySpace have taken matters into their own hands.
In what initially seems like a parody on Google’s ‘Don’t be Evil’ maxim to do what’s right for users and not just Google, the engineers have done much more than that, and have created a bookmarklet to reverse the changes Google has made that brings its own social network Google+ to the fore of all searches on its site.
In recent weeks, Google launched Search Plus Your World – even the title is a bit ugh – that merged Google+ into standard searches on the Google search engine, to the horror of rivals like Twitter.
The bookmarklet effectively launches a ‘Don’t be evil’ bookmark that appears at the top of a users’ browser bar. The bookmarklet works in Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, but not Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
When doing searches one simply clicks on the ‘Don’t be evil’ button and a new set of results based on the original search appears.
The engineers have potentially done the internet world a massive favour by adding social suggestions that accommodate Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and, of course, Google+, too – which was very decent of them, don’t ya think?
