The change has come in for criticism from a number of search experts. "Search engines are supposed to send you away to the best information, even if they don't have their own in stock," noted Danny Sullivan, who added that Google has previously been excellent at providing links to the most suitable information. "Today's change is one of the few times where I'm thinking 'What the hell are you doing, Google?' "

He thinks that Google's move, which clearly promotes its own nascent service – which was only launched last year, but which Google said had 40m users last October – could attract antitrust scrutiny, because it is only listing information from Google+ posts, and because it is offering suggestions of users to follow on Google+.

In the US, it is illegal for a company which is dominant in one field to use that dominance to gain competitive advantage in another.

The "says Twitter" bit feels a bit like one of those situations where a football player waves his/her empty hand in front of the ref to try and get another player sent off.

On the other hand, this development does seem at odds with the "do no evil" mantra at Google, and in particular with the last bullet point of point 6 of their philosophy:

We never manipulate rankings to put our partners higher in our search results and no one can buy better PageRank. Our users trust our objectivity and no short-term gain could ever justify breaching that trust.

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