Google rolled out the optional social search feature to US users this month, and soon encountered criticism that "Search plus your world" pushes Google+ results up in its search rankings at the expense of other social networks.
Now engineers at Google's rival social networking companies have created a tool, dubbed "Don't be Evil", to show what "Search plus your world" results would turn up, if they used pure organic results, rather than Google+ results.
The coding, in the form of a "bookmarklet", can be downloaded from a site called and sits within a user's browser.
The name of the tool is a nod to Google's "Don't be evil" motto.
The creators of the tool claim that all of the information comes from Google itself and all of the ranking decisions are made by Google’s own algorithms, with no other services, APIs or proprietary data stores.
The software is open source and the creators invite all users, including Google, to experiment with it.
Google declined to comment on the coding project.
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