Would Google's new search features provide more relevant results if they included the entire social web, rather than only Google's social network? That's the question we tried to answer over the weekend with a quick coding project. We're releasing all of this code as open source, and we invite Google to use it. As you use this tool, please keep in mind two things. First, the tool is built using only the information that already exists inside of Google. It does not access any other websites or APIs. No special contracts were summoned, and no lawyers were harmed in the making of this video. And two, every decision from which results to show, to how to rank them, even how to display them, is made simply by querying Google itself. The tool does not bias toward or away from any social website, in any respect. We'll explain more about that in a minute, but first let's take a look. To begin, let's see how Google does on relevance today. Let's do a search for cooking. You can see that Google returns a result for Jamie Oliver here at the top of the page. That's pretty relevant since Jamie is a world-renowned chef with a number of popular TV programs. But what happens when we click on this result? We land on an abandoned Google Plus profile that Jamie last updated nearly two months ago. Is that really the last time that Jamie shared information with his fans, and can that really be the most relevant result? To answer this question, let's ask Google. We'll search again this time for Jamie Oliver directly. You can see that Google returns a result for Jamie Oliver's Twitter profile as the first is social result in its listings. And when we click on it, we see that Jamie has in fact shared new information, as recently as this weekend. Not only that, but over 10 times as many people are following Jamie on Twitter as we're following him on Google Plus. So when Google focuses purely on delivering the most relevant answer to users, it does find the most relevant social result. Why doesn't it show it in this new feature? Is it because it doesn't have access to the most relevant result? It doesn't seem like that's the problem. After all, we found the result in Google itself. To prove this point, let's see what happens when we look at the same query through the tool that we built, which is called a bookmarklet. A bookmarklet is basically a small amount of code you can add to your web browser to enable additional functionality. To use the bookmarklet, we go to focusontheeuser.org. And we drag the bookmark link to our bookmarks bar. And if you're using Chrome like I am, you may need to show the bookmarks bar via the view menu first. I'll drag this link over here. And now let's try that search again. So I'll go to Google and I search for cooking and I click on the don't be evil bookmarklet. Notice that we didn't actually build a different search engine. Instead, using the bookmarklet, we can just modify the Google search results page temporarily to illustrate what's possible. When I clicked on the button, I now see results not only from Google's social network, but throughout the entire social web. I see the same people for linking to the more relevant social profiles on services like Twitter and Tumblr. This works for a number of other queries too. For example, movies, photography, or music. When I search Facebook now, rather than getting Mark Zuckerberg's empty Google Plus profile, I instead get his updated Facebook profile, which seems to make a lot more sense and seems much more relevant to what I'm searching for. So how are we picking which social networks to show? Are we just being biased ourselves? No. The bookmarklet is simply doing behind the scenes what we manually did earlier. It is conducting a Google search for each person, looking at the first 10 pages of Google results, and picking out the highest ranked social result as judged by Google. Underneath, we display other social profiles that Google found and ranked within the first 10 pages of its results. Notice that for some results, for example, for Hila Johnson, there's no Google Plus result at all. That's not because we're excluding Google Plus. It's simply because Google did not rank her plus profile within the first 10 pages of the natural results for her name. But what about all the data that we're displaying for these results, like the profile pictures? Surely we must be getting these from some sort of special APIs, right? Nope. Here again, we're simply asking Google itself. Google gives website owners a special tool that they can use to see what the results will look like in search. Let me show you that now. This is Google's tool for webmasters. So in order to display our results, we simply ask Google's tool what the result should look like, and then we render it according to Google's own instructions. Here's the example that Google gives to webmasters to demonstrate what a people result from LinkedIn might look like in Google. You might be saying to yourself, wait a minute, I never see LinkedIn or Twitter profile pictures when I search Google, and that's true. You don't. As you can see, Google's own tool demonstrates that they have this information and can display it to web page owners. But for whatever reason, they choose never to display it to actual users of the search engine. In fact, even when you search for Google's own example from this page, you can see that the only result to show a picture is the one from Google's own network. That's a choice that Google has made, but it's not their only option. They have the data. And in our unfiltered version of Google, we display the result is exactly as Google says that they can. Now let's look at another area where Google hard-coded results from its own social network. Let's see what happens when we Google AT&T. The second and third results on the page, right under the official AT&T website at AT&T.com, are very large Google plus results complete with images. This is true for a number of brand queries, such as the New York Times, Lexus, or Carnival. But if you look at Google's regular search results, you can see that Google ranks AT&T's Twitter profile as its top social result, followed closely by Facebook. Where does it rank AT&T's Google plus profile in the regular listings? Let's see if we can find it. There it is. It's at the bottom of the sixth page of results. This makes some sense since AT&T has 20 times the amount of followers on Twitter than it does on Google plus and 200 times the amount of followers on Facebook. So let's do the search again and click on the Don't Be Evil bookmarklet and see what happens when we just let Google be Google. There we go. The indented social result under AT&T.com is now AT&T's Twitter profile since that's what Google ranked first as a social result for AT&T. Now let's take a look at yet another area where Google hard codes Google plus results that don't necessarily seem to be the most relevant. Witness what happens when I do a search for John Baton, a well-known journalist who literally wrote the book on Google. You can see that Google starts giving me results right in the type ahead, but why does it link to John's Google plus profile? Just a few pixels down here in the regular listings. You can see that Google clearly identifies his Twitter profile to be his most relevant social result. So let's click Don't Be Evil and see what happens. There we go. How about a search for Jamie Oliver? Again, Google recommends a result that it knows has not been updated in nearly two months. So I'll click Don't Be Evil and I'll try that search again. Now the Jamie Oliver result links to his Twitter profile because that's the result that Google has deemed to be the most relevant socially on a search for Jamie Oliver. So there you have it. We think the results speak for themselves.