The Carroll Standard

...with stuff from your social network.

Farhad Manjoo | Slate:

Google just broke its search engine. It did so under the guise of an improvement, an effort to mesh traditional search results with stuff from your social network. Within hours of announcing the change, Google took fire from tech pundits and competitors. Most of the criticism focused on implementation: Instead of drawing content from many different social networks, Google’s new results will lean heavily on its own network, Google+.

How does new-and-not-improved Google work? I just searched for “Mitt Romney New Hampshire,” and among my results were a handful of posts and images that my friends and colleagues shared via Google+. Regular readers know that I consider Google+ a wasteland and that I’ve left it for dead. On the other hand, I’m constantly on Twitter and Facebook—but my search for Romney turned up nothing that had been shared by people on those sites. Meanwhile, as Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan points out, if you search for “Facebook,” Google now suggests that you follow Mark Zuckerberg’s fallow Google+ page. Zuckerberg’s most active online outpost is on Facebook. If Google doesn’t tell you about the Facebook CEO’s Facebook page, it’s broken. ... continued...