A week ago, Google announced that its social search update named “Search plus Your World” had been launched. Read on to learn what it is and how important a role it plays in business today.
The Definition of Social Search
Social Search began as a Google Labs experiment that aimed to bring search results to people that were more personalized. For example, if you searched “San Rafael, California” without Social Search, you would have had a harder time finding your friend’s personal blog about San Rafael than if you had searched with Social Search. The spiders of Search plus Your World — as Social Search is now known — particularly favor the social network Google+, meaning that anything you or your friends have posted on Google+ will influence your search results and is more likely to appear in searches.
Search plus Your World only works if you have a Google+ account and are logged into it while searching. However, you should know that Google still personalizes your results even if you don’t have Google+, just based on your location and language. Take a look at the example below, where I’ve searched “technology” while logged into my Google+ account.
Check out the new “People and Pages on Google+” sidebar, which features related Google+ pages ranked by highest number of followers. Above this sidebar are two icons that will change my search results depending on which one I select. In this screenshot, “personal” search results are hidden, and I see results that are identical to the ones seen by non-Google+ members. Below is a screenshot of my interface when the personal results icon is selected.
If you look at the top of these search results, you’ll see that I have “60 personal results.” When I click on this link, I get:
These results feature posts by my friends and other contacts within Google+. Now type in the name of a person, and look at what happens below:
I typed my name in and the first “guess” to come up under my search bar was my Google+ profile. If you’re marketing yourself, take note.
What Social Search Means for Businesses
One company in particular that is affected by Search plus Your World is Twitter, which seeks to provide relevant Tweets of information through an unbiased search engine. Twitter spokesman Matt Graves issued an unhappy statement on the subject:
“For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results anytime they wanted to find something on the Internet.
Often, they want to know more about world events and breaking news. Twitter has emerged as a vital source of this real-time information, with more than 100 million users sending 250 million Tweets every day on virtually every topic. As we’ve seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter; as a result, Twitter accounts and Tweets are often the most relevant results.
We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users.”
Other social media companies like Facebook (whose partner is search engine Bing) are likely bothered by Google’s search update for the same reasons. Bing favors Facebook results in a similar way that Google features Google+ content.
With the arrival of social search, it is now vital for companies to have a Google+ business page and post on it with regularity. The more followers your company page has, the more likely it is to appear in that new “People and Pages” sidebar. Something else to keep in mind is the partnership between Google and YouTube, and the subsequent high rankings that YouTube videos have in Google searches. It is more important than ever that your company have a YouTube channel as well.
With Google as the most visited website in the world and the most popular search engine, Google+ is now the social media ruler of search engine optimization.
