In Other News, Every Social Startup Pings Google Team Today!
Search Engine Land has a post up today in response to Google’s new “Search Plus Your World” (along with just about every other tech publisher.) One of the most interesting aspects is the response from Amit Singhal (the guy who oversees google search result rankings) about integrating other services. Here is the relevant quote from Search Engine Land’s post with a little context from the post first:
Search Plus Your World doesn’t cover content on Facebook. Or Twitter. Or Flickr. Or any social network or place where content might be shared to a more limited audience. Currently, “Search Plus Your World” would be better described as “Search Plus Google+”
Why are these others missing?
“Facebook and Twitter and other services, basically, their terms of service don’t allow us to crawl them deeply and store things. Google+ is the only [network] that provides such a persistent service,” Singhal told me. “Of course, going forward, if others were willing to change, we’d look at designing things to see how it would work.”
While I realize Amit’s comment is in the context of large social networks like Facebook & Twitter, which Google (unfortunately) seems unable to come to terms with. If I was running a small social startup today, I’d be pinging the team at Google every way I could muster. Interestingly, if I was Amit I’d also do a few token integrations just to add credibility to the claim above - so this really could be a win win for a few startup hustlers.
