Google has announced that it is rolling out Search + Your World over the next few days, bringing results from your friends – and we’re talking here about Google+ friends – to the fore.
How does it work?
Well, when it comes to your region (so far it has been rolled out to .com, but not yet for example .co.uk or .com.au), your Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) will show you, by default, a mixture of traditional results intermingled with results from your Google+ friends. In the top right hand corner of your screen you’ll see a pair of ‘radio buttons’ that switch the results between ‘normal’ and ‘social’.
Here is their promo video…
It’s a major change for Google, and for bloggers a hugely significant one… as long as they have a significant following on Google+!
Image: Brionv
I can think of two reasons why the change may not be helpful to bloggers:
1) It may help bloggers to get more traffic from their existing friends and fans, but by adding social clutter to Google’s already cluttered “universal search” results, it could produce fewer Google referrals from outside the bloggers’ circles.
2) Searchers will now have the ability to turn off personalized search results by clicking on a button (instead of logging off their accounts), and that new feature may act as a counterweight to the integration of “social” results.
As a practical matter, Google+ has a fairly small audience, so the integration of “social search” probably won’t have much impact on search and referrals unless Google can gain access to Facebook and Twitter data.
Not my favorite news. It might be useful if the social network of my Twitter reach “counted”. It almost feels like a desperate move to bouy G+ by forcing website owners to drag others into it for search benefits.
There is a point also of reducing the randomness of the web. I guess this is part of the point to reduce chaos. But if they start taking social circles too much in hand then risk is that I have a harder time seeing things that my friends haven’t. I get that you can turn it off now but in the future? Dunno maybe it will be a good anticrap measure but I don’t feel to need to have my search results approved by my peers.
I began seeing the new search results this morning. The results were junkier than usual, with G+ results mixed in with the normal results, so I clicked the “off” button, and the extra clutter disappeared instantly.
Well, that’s probably because they are so skewed towards Google+ high rankers – the point I was making, and a point that will be made again in about 30 mins when my colleague Rich Whittaker discusses a Google+ evaluation tool. If Google was evaluating Facebook friends (!), we might find the SERPS reflecting a more recognisable version of the social media Internet as we know it.
Make no mistake, as I think Andrew (groundedtraveler.com) is intimating, this is a MAJOR play by Google.
A while back, Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan quoted Matt Cutts of Google as saying that, even at “full roll-out,” searches by signed-in users “would still be in the single-digit percentages of all Google searchers on Google.com.” (And that’s at Google.com, not google.co.uk, google.de, and other non-U.S. Google sites.)
I’m sure that the current integration of Google+ results into Google’s SERPs is being monitored closely by Google, and whether such integration becomes permanent will depend on user behavior. (If few users click on “social search” results, or if those who do click tend to back out quickly and return to the SERP, the G+ integration will die like so many earlier Google products that haven’t performed well when tested in the real world.)
It’s certainly a game changer. Whether that will be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ remains to be seen, I think. My friend and colleague had this to say about the new fancy shmancy Google search: http://www.radian6.com/blog/2012/01/what-google-plus-your-world-means-for-the-social-media-marketing-world/