Google recently released a significant feature to the search page dubbed “Search Plus Your World.” The idea is that Google wants to integrate social search with algorithmic search. This feature allows the user to see relevant social results from their Google+ account, as well as Google+ pages, site links, and suggestions in the auto-complete (type Britney Spears in your search bar to see this last one in action).
You can now see these kinds of results, if you are signed into Google+:
- Listings from the web
- Listings from the web, boosted because of your personal behavior
- Listings from the web, boosted because of your social connections
- Public Google+ posts, photos or Google Picasa photos (all of which are also listings from the web)
- Private or “limited” Google+ posts, photos or Google Picasa photos shared with you
Google has been receiving a lot of criticism for this move, based upon anti-trust legal disputes. Experts claim that the search engine is promoting its own social network on its search engine, which has over a 66% market share. Although you may search for music or an artist and want to see which of their profiles is the most significant, Google will only provide you with their Google+ page, if they have one.
Google has argued that it would include Twitter and Facebook results if they were given full access to their data. Google fellow Amit Singhal states, “Facebook and Twitter and other services, basically, their terms of service don’t allow us to crawl them deeply and store things. Google+ is the only [network] that provides such a persistent service… Of course, going forward, if others were willing to change, we’d look at designing things to see how it would work.”
What does this mean for businesses? It means that Google is going to keep integrating Google+ more and more into the search pages, and that means more real-estate is going to go to brands, businesses, and personalities that fully leverage the Google+ social network. However, this may cause an odd issue where there is more business related activity on the social network than there is true social activity. At this point, it’s unclear what place the social network will have in terms of cohesive web strategy. It is clear though, that Google will give nice dividends to users that leverage the social network and all it has to offer its users in terms of additional real estate on the search engine results page.
Interested in social search that isn’t premised on Google+? Checkout the “Don’t Be Evil” tool by Facebook and Twitter that pulls in social results from their networks.