• by Gavin O'Malley , Staff Writer @mp_gavin, January 11, 2012

As was widely predicted, social networks are taking issue with Google’s move to bake Google+ into users’ Google search results.

In a statement, Twitter complained that “people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users” would suffer from not being able to quickly see tweets in search results. 

“Twitter's criticism … underscored the growing competition between the Web companies,” writes Reuters. “And it comes at a time when Google is facing antitrust scrutiny for favoring its own services within its search results.”

“Twitter makes an absolutely valid point here when it says that surfacing its own content over trusted publishing sites like Twitter is dangerous for users,” writes The Next Web. “A quality tweet losing prominence in search results simply because it wasn’t published on Google’s own social network is absurd.”

“The implication is clear: Google, as the world’s dominant search engine, is using its market position to promote its own social network at the expense of other networks, such as Twitter, and that this isn’t just anti-competitive, but bad for the internet,” GigaOm writes. “That kind of complaint is virtually tailor-made to appeal to antitrust regulators at the Federal Trade Commission and/or the Justice Department.”

“It looks like Google is using their natural search monopoly to shove their late-to-the-game social network in your face (to the detriment of the other social networks),” ex-TechCruncher MG Siegler adds. “It looks anti-competitive.”

Meanwhile, Google’s response to the complaints seems nothing if not snarky. Referring to an old feed-sharing deal between Google and Twitter -- which Twitter has since taken up with Bing --- it said: “We are a bit surprised by Twitter’s comments about Search plus Your World, because they chose not to renew their agreement with us last summer.” 

Regarding the exchange of statements, TechCrunch’s Alexia Tsotsis joked: “I love it when tech companies start acting like bickering exes.”

Seeming to support Google’s position, Jeff Jarvis wrote on his Google+ page: “Me thinks the platform [Twitter] doth whine too much.”