Google recently rolled out “Search Plus Your World” – one of the most radical changes search has ever seen. Google’s results now contain public Google+ content, Google+ content that was shared with you, and Google+ content that you’ve shared.
Search Plus Your World only works when you’re signed in to Google. It aims to further personalize your search results further by incorporating what your friends have shared with you or shared publicly regarding the topic you’re searching for. For now Search Plus Your World only searches Google+ social content. I’m sure that we’ll soon see an integration of twitter results into search as well. An integration with Facebook connections seem far fetched at this point. In an ideal world, I see all social networks working together to provide a richer experience for the user.
How does it help?
When we are seeking information or considering a purchase, we ask family and friends for their opinion, read reviews by others before making our purchasing decision (I talk about this more in my previous post how purchase decisions are powered by information via connected and informed consumers). These conversations between friends and family happen online on social networks. Wouldn’t integrating that to your search results help? yes it does.
A search I did for “video compression” provided me 20 personal search results along with regular web search.
I was drawn to a personal search result by Chris Pirillo, who is in my Google+ circles.
He posts a lot of YouTube videos so I knew he’s had a lot of experience with video and I trusted his post. You see how it helps?
Google+ for business
If you don’t have a presence on Google+, it’s time that you seriously considered this. This integration is only available for Google+ at this time. I will talk more about how to set up a Google+ page in my next post. Happy searching.