Google Is Serious About Social -- Introducing "Search plus Your World"
Google yesterday launched “Search, plus your World,” as it’s tentatively called. It takes the best features of Google Plus and integrates them with Google search. It mainly includes results from your friends in a miniature row right at the top of your search results. With such powerful placement, the arguments for businesses to get themselves on Google Plus just got a whole lot more compelling.
Social search has been a buzzword ever since Facebook started getting mainstream traction, and it’s still not something that’s easy to do. It’s not a simple task for me to find out which of my friends have posted something about “The Strokes” on Facebook, but Google is now solving that problem exactly. It’s something that is useful to anybody who values their friend’s opinions, and obviously Google are the masters of search, so this new feature should give most users a great experience.
This isn’t the kind of feature that will get people excited overnight, but for that one time when you are looking for your friends’ opinions or shared links on a specific topic, you’ll be thankful that Google Plus exists. Now that assumes that your friends are actually using the service, but if recent numbers are any indication the population is growing on G+.
On the official Google Blog, Google announces that the awkwardly named Search, plus Your World consists of three main new features.
- 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;
- 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,
- 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.
The three features add up to mean that you can search a person’s photos, shares, profiles as well as business profiles and pages. They’ve pretty much indexed the entire G+ network, and that can only mean more quality results for Google Searchers.
A video introducing the new feature is given below. So what do you think? Will this be enough to get you using G+?
