A team of engineers, drawn from Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, have rebuilt Google to “focus on the user” and re-jigger Google’s recent Search Plus Your World changes, which put results for Google+ pages above sometimes more relevant pages like those on other social networks.
“We created a tool that uses Google’s own relevance measure—the ranking of their organic search results—to determine what social content should appear in the areas where Google+ results are currently hardcoded,” thesite explaining the proof of concept says.
The project, called Focus on the User, compares Google’s new search results to those that would be, the engineers say, more relevant. One example shows Google’s results for a search for “movies” — it pulls up links to Google+ pages for actors, IMDb and movies, even if those Google+ pages are used less often than the actors’ Twitter accounts or IMDb’s Facebook page.