Facebook and Twitter take on Google with 'Don't Be Evil' browser add-on

Facebook, Twitter and MySpace have teamed up to create a browser add-on that is designed to remove what the trio see as Google's bias towards its own Google+ social network in search results.

A few weeks ago, Google started rolling out its "Search, plus Your World" update, which feeds information from the Google+ social network back to users to offer them a more personalised search experience.

As Twitter argued at the time, one effect of the update is that Google+ content is prioritised at the expense of other information that may be more relevant to the search user.

The browser add-on launched today allows web users to see Google search results as they would have appeared before the update.

The add-on is available from the Focus on the User site and the engineers have open-sourced the code, called "Don't be evil" in a reference to Google's own tagline, so that it can be used by anyone.

"How much better would social search be if Google surfaced results from all across the web?" asks the Focus on the User homepage.

"We created a tool that uses Google's own relevance measure – the ranking of their organic search results – to determine what social content should appear in the areas where Google+ results are currently hardcoded."

Web users wanting the add-on can drag a button from the Focus on the User website to their browser's bookmarks toolbar. The add-on does not currently work in Internet Explorer.

The move by Google's chief rivals underlines the growing animosity between the three major sites as they battle for supremacy in the social networking world.

Below: The image shows the difference in search results between the Google Search Plus Your World system and when information from all major social sites is included.