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Note: Google competitors ramp up protests that the search giant favors its own social content, hurting Facebook and Twitter. One problem, guys: There's no such thing as truly organic search.
Google's decision about a week ago to integrate content from its Google+ social network into its search listings was met with immediate criticism from competitors like Twitter, which argued that the mixed bag of links would make its more relevant content harder to find.
Over the weekend, the fight turned nasty. Facebook engineer Blake Ross, working in conjunction with programmers from MySpace and Twitter, released a Chrome extension bookmarklet called "Don't Be Evil." That's a reference to Google's unofficial motto, one that aims to highlight the claim that Search plus Your World, as Google calls its social search integration, favors Google's content and returns less relevant results.
Once installed, the browser extension rewrites search results culled from Google+ with results from Google's Web index, which tends to favor older, more established social Web services like LinkedIn...