Sometimes the nicest of people, when faced with the pressure of competition, make evil stupid decisions. That’s pretty much what happened to Google when it realized that Facebook was about to eat its lunch with regards to social data on the web — so it started doing dumb things, like building Google Buzz, Wave and most recently rolling out “Search Plus Your World” which to the rest of the world just looks like “Search Plus Google+.”
Now a bunch of Twitter and Facebook and Myspace engineers (I love it when nerds grow a pair) are gently reminding Google of its original priorities with the ingenious Focus on the User, a bookmarklet that attempts to get Google users their “real” social results. Focus on the User uses Google’s own algorithms to serve up relevant social sites, you know, instead of all Google+ all the time. I’ve tried it, it works, let’s eat.
The best part, and the part that cuts through all the PR bullshit, is this in the FAQ:
Q: I thought Google needed a deal and more info from social sites to integrate them into its new social features?
A: This is clearly not true. The bookmarklet never accesses any server or API outside of google.com. The information has already been indexed and ranked by Google.
You can fool some people sometimes …