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Google Gets a Taste of Its Own “Don’t Be Evil” Medicine

A group of rival social-media programmers is encouraging Google to follow its own advice by building a tool that undermines the company’s social search engine tweaks.

The company’s January changes to its search engine ranking favored the company’s own Google+ above other social media, drawing angry responses from Twitter and privacy groups, who lobbied the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the changes.

Over the weekend, engineers from Twitter, Myspace, and Facebook created the Don’t Be Evil bookmarklet, a browser plug-in that lets you revert to Google’s older—and possibly more evenhanded—search results.

A video and instructions for using the bookmarklet have been posted on FocusOnTheUser.org. Along with relaxing its Google+ policy on the use of pseudonyms after human rights groups complained about privacy needs, the company seems to be having a bit of a “don’t be evil” week thanks to the only thing more powerful than Google itself: the user.