Google's Larry Page and Eric Schmidt have praised Facebook's 'Like' button, explaining that it will help their search engine decide what kind of information people are interested in.
Speaking at the Google Zeitgeist conference, Google co-founder Page and CEO Schmidt both spoke about the rise of the 'Like' button, with the latter believing that this way of sharing content is a 'new phenomenon'.
"It will probably allow our search to become better," said Schmidt, "because we have more information from people on what matters and what does not matter.
"So…it's a nice improvement, and it looks to me like there's going to be a lot of these sort of ideas.
"It's a new phenomenon and it's a good one generally."
Page up
Page pointed out that Google already has Buzz tools that offer similar 'like' functionality, but also sees the move as a key one.
"I think it's an important area to get lots of feedback from people," said Page.
"In [Google] Buzz we have a 'Buzz this' button which is similar to [Facebook Like].
"I think people have been sharing stuff in lots of different way for a long time and that's clearly a really important signal for a lot of different things.
"I think we have done a pretty good job of harnessing that data so it's good that there is actually starting to be more and more of that data that's explicit from users and I think that's pretty useful in lots of things."
