Today, Google announced a major change to search engine results. This is probably one of the most significant changes I’ve seen to Google in quite a while. The new “Search Plus Your World” features begin rolling out immediately.
The idea behind this new feature integrates traditional search results with shared items from a user’s network of friends.
Google’s new “Search Plus Your World will have a new “Personal Results” view that will show to users by default. These “personal results” will be tailored results based on Google+ shared content, personal web history, online habits and social connections. For those that have been following my series on social signals in search, this should not be a surprise that Google is “all-in” with Google+.
We’re transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships. We began this transformation with Social Search, and today we’re taking another big step in this direction by introducing three new features:
- 1. Personal Results, which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts—both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page;
- 2. Profiles in Search, both in autocomplete and results, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following; and,
- 3. People and Pages, which help you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks. Because behind most every query is a community.
Source – http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/search-plus-your-world.html
Google+ people suggestions are also integrated into these new results. If users search for broad topics, like music, Google will show what it considers “prominent people who frequently discuss this topic on Google+”. Again, Google is gauging social authority from Google+. Of course Google is only pulling these “prominent people” from Google+, not Facebook or Twitter. As we know, that’s a substantial less amount of people. To stay that Google is showing special bias toward Google+ is a big understatement.
As another sign that Google is pushing Google+ hard, they are also adding profiles to search. This will give a whole new meaning to “Googleing” someone. By typing the first few letters of a name, Google will auto-complete the name based on the network of friends. See example below that Google provided, since it has not rolled out to me yet.
In even more interesting move, this new feature is not indexing Facebook as deep (nor did it ever). However, that’s more likely a Facebook problem than a Google problem. Facebook’s term of service don’t allow for search to crawl to deep within the site. That’s great from a security and privacy aspect, but not so great if business wants content ranked well. Google+ shares almost everything (also a good and bad thing), and they’ve made that clear from the beginning.
See the video below to learn out about Search Plus Your World … and paperclips.
Tags: Google, Google Plus, News, Social Media, Social Signals in Search, world« « Facebook Advertising – Body Copy | AdWords Ad Extensions » »
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