Why Twitter Has Problems with Google’s New Personalized Search?

Yesterday, I wrote about Google introducing ‘search plus your world’ which is basically a toggle for looking up personalized search results and normal search results. The problem is that, personalized search results only show up Google+ related links at the moment.

Another possible issue with Google’s new tweak to search, is that personalized results show up as default. See the image below which show personalized search results. You can click on the toggle to remove all personalized search results but we know most people will not use the toggle.

Twitter’s problem with personalized search results

Twitter seems to be a little nervous about Google search now being partial to Google+. At the moment the only social results showing up on personal results are from Google+. Links to Twitter and Facebook are conspicuously missing from personalized results.

Twitter released an emailed statement shared by AllThingsD, explaining why the new developments are bad for Twitter and the internet in general.

For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results anytime they wanted to find something on the Internet. Often, they want to know more about world events and breaking news. Twitter has emerged as a vital source of this real-time information, with more than 100 million users sending 250 million Tweets every day on virtually every topic.

As we’ve seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter; as a result, Twitter accounts and Tweets are often the most relevant results. We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users

This might be a way for Google to force social networks to share data with itself. At the moment all links on Twitter are nofollow, which means a Google bot cannot follow the link on a tweet. Google is right in the sense if they cannot follow a link on a tweet, they cannot vouch for a tweet’s relevance either.

But then if all links on Facebook or Twitter were dofollow, these services could face a serious issue of spam, where webmasters might exploit these social networks for backlinks.

Even if that happens, I doubt Google will rank a link from social media very highly anyways, as it might affect the quality of its own search results.

I feel Twitter does have a point, but Google can hardly be expected to not leverage their own product. What are your views? Do drop in your comments.