Google Search Plus Your World… Is it A Good or Bad Thing?
Posted by Patrick Murphy on Tue, Jan 17, 2012
This week, Google launched Search Plus Your World (SPYW) and it’s been making for a lot of controversy in the media. Some say it’s not good for competition and some say it may affect relevancy of search results. So what are these changes?
Google posted a blog on their website detailing the changes. It starts as follows: Google Search has always been about finding the best results for you. Sometimes that means results from the public web, but sometimes it means your personal content or things shared with you by people you care about. These wonderful people and this rich personal content is currently missing from your search experience. Search is still limited to a universe of webpages created publicly, mostly by people you’ve never met. Today, we’re changing that by bringing your world, rich with people and information, into search.
Google will be transforming from the simple search engine we see today into an engine that understand content, people and relationships. Google initially did this with social search, and now they’ve made three further changes.
Personal Results: personal results will enable you to find information just for you, like Google+ photos and posts. These will be your own content, as well as those kinds of content shared specifically with you. Only you will be able to see these search results.
Profiles in Search: you’ll now be able to use search to find people you know or people you’re interested in following.
People & Pages: these will help you to find people’s profiles and Google + pages, which are related to a specific topic or area of interest. You’ll be able to follow them in just a few clicks.
The thing about these changes is that they’re a solid step in the direction of full social content integration into search results. It poses challenges to brands because they need to be encouraging followers and likes just as they do on Facebook and Twitter. It’s another task to add to the growing job spec of a social media marketer.
Our advice: start claiming your brand names on +1, link to your profile from your main site, and include +1 buttons on your site. Make an effort to connect with fans through Google+. Otherwise, your search ratings could take a hit in the future.
Don't forget to check out this FREE whitepaper on 'How to Googlize your Business'.
