- Q:How does this tool work?
-
A: If Google decides that it's relevant to surface Google+
page as a result in any of the areas where Google+ content is hardcoded,
the tool searches Google for the name of the Google+ page. Then, the
tool identifies the social profiles within the first ten pages of
Google results (top 100 results). The ones Google ranks highest —
whether they are from Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Quora,
Tumblr, Foursquare, Crunchbase, FriendFeed, Stack Overflow, Github or Google+
— replace the previous results that could only be from Google+.
This tool is offered as a bookmarklet, which is a small bit of code that runs in a web browser and temporarily enables additional functionality.
- Q: Where do I see the new search results?
- A: See our video walkthrough or our examples page for dozens of queries that will trigger the new results.
- 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.
- Q: What about the profile pictures the bookmarklet is showing? Where do those come from?
- A: Even the rich data like profile pictures are pulled directly from Google. Specifically, the bookmarklet enters the address of the new social result into Google’s rich snippets tool and uses the information that Google provides. What this reveals is that while Google is only showing images for Google+ results, it has images from many other services.
- Q: Do I need to click on the bookmarklet every time I search?
-
A: No—once you've visited Google.com and clicked on the bookmarklet, it will continue to work for subsequent queries until you click away from Google.com. For example, you can go to Google, click the bookmarklet, and search for "music", then "photography", then "news" to see modified results for each. But if you leave Google.com, you'll have to click the bookmarklet on your next return due to limitations of the technology.
Our code is open source, so anyone may turn this into a browser extension if clicking the bookmarklet gets cumbersome.
- Q: Why isn't this working for me?
-
A: Google has only rolled out its new social features on Google.com to a percentage of United States users. If you don't see any of these social results on Google, you do not have the feature yet, so unfortunately you can't use this tool.
Furthermore, note that the tool does not work in Internet Explorer; you must use Chrome, Firefox or Safari.
If you're using Chrome and it's not working, you are probably running into this bug in Google Chrome. To fix the issue, do any of the following:
- Search from Google.com rather than searching from Chrome's address bar;
- Or go to File -> New Tab, right click on the "Google Search" icon and click "Remove from Chrome";
- Or use another browser
- Q: Is this a Google product?
- A: No. This is a proof of concept built by some engineers at Facebook, Twitter and MySpace and in consultation with several other social networking companies that shows what is possible with social content in Google’s results. Contact us at team@focusontheuser.org.