No one (normal) questions social content has an important role to play in today's world. Google's mission is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible".
When we search on the web, we're searching from our personal perspective. Search is a personal activity and there's a great deal of information that's important to us in our social networks. Google can't ignore this, regardless if the incumbents want to play nice or not.
Earlier this week Google released Search, Plus Your World in an effort to make its search engine more social. Reviews have been mixed to say the least. Google's search engine has always been revered as a beautifully simplistic service. Some people think these new social results muck it all up. Maybe they're right. Maybe not.
Google's innovating. That's a good thing. Period. Will this effort be successful or a failure? We don't know, but you can't know until you try - that's critical. People and companies that try new things are always criticized by others - that's the price of leadership.
Switch to Bing? Absolutely not. Bing is slower and has fewer results. Google's technology is literally years ahead of Microsoft's. Google.com is a better search engine. Technology is only half of the search engine business, you actually have to make money as well.
Hate the social results? Turn them off.
Google.com > Search Settings
Then look for "Personal Results" about half way down and turn them off.
Just like that, 5 seconds maybe, and all is right with the world.
Regarding Facebook and Twitter. They've been locking their data up tight and creating silos of proprietary data - it's not "on the web" it's on Facebook. Facebook doesn't own the social graph, it's on loan. I don't feel sorry for either one of these firms and it's great to see more competition in the social space. Twitter in particular has been ruthless in how they've treated their ecosystem. Twitter couldn't figure out how to run its own business so they decided to highjack the businesses of others.
"Google needs to be more social." Everyone and their mother has been screaming this for a few years now - well you asked for it and here we go.
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