Search Plus your World with Google Plus

Google Search Plus Your World

Is a significant change in the way search results will appear in the near future. It factors in social sharing of website authors’ content, and it now ranks sites based on how many regular readers follow specific content. Three specific components of this search ranking are designated personal results, profiles in search, and people and places. These features are engineered to work together to give each website and blog a more comprehensive page ranking number. According to some experts in digital marketing, Google Search Plus Your World differs from the more well-known Panda algorithm because it gathers and ranks a wide variety of content based on social networking rather than just on degrees of originality.

 One of the more common questions about this change concerns its effect on established guidelines for search engine optimization. While some people may believe Google Search Plus Your World will be a death knell for traditional SEO techniques, the reality is not as absolute. Just as with any type of major change in technology, it will require web designers, bloggers, and Internet marketers to change and adapt along with it. Building a following of loyal readers or online customers has now become just as important for SEO as including good keywords in a site’s written content. This added requirement is particularly evident in the personal results section.

Google searchers will soon see a blue man icon next to entries of sites that appear in their search results. This icon points to similar results that each searcher’s friends like about the same subject matter. The personal results feature pulls this data from connections made through each person’s existing Google account. SEO experts point out that this is a major shift as far as where organic search results will appear below the personalized results. One person’s results will also be quite different from someone else’s depending on past online interactions and viewed sites.

 

The personal results feature will make community participation a much bigger priority for website authors and bloggers, regardless of their areas of interest and expertise. It will also be an important factor for business and ecommerce sites whose owners want to draw in customer interest. Managing several social media connections on a daily basis could potentially become a full-time job itself for mid-sized to large businesses who hope to stay competitive through this kind of online presence. Personal results will also make high quality site content more important than ever because better content is more likely to be shared among site visitors.

Google’s designers assigned to the profiles in search feature have taken some cues from Facebook. The goal behind this change to Google has been to streamline the process of finding friends by typing a name into the search box without the need to dig through pages of unrelated results. Results about different people will include links to their existing social networking profiles as well as to material that they have liked online. Concerns about privacy have predictably followed this feature, and Google’s answer has been implementation of a secure sockets layer, or SSL.

The SSL certificate used for Google Search Plus Your World will act as a safeguard against too much sensitive information about people being freely available to just anyone else. Although this technology is in place as a security measure, early testers of the Google profiles in search feature report some kinks that still need to be fixed for some types of people searches by name. The SSL certificate can sometimes filter out too much data and yield a “Not Provided” message for some types of searches. It also has an effect on the numbers and types of keywords that Google Analytics recognizes.

Google Search Plus Your World’s people and pages feature is tied closely to the profiles in search feature due to the increased importance of social sharing. This component has also been designed to require the use of Google Plus in order to rank well in search results. Individuals and businesses who want to build significant followings are strongly advised to build profiles on this platform and to share their high quality content as much as possible. Brand names with prominent Google Plus presences will have the best chances of bringing in the needed traffic to turn profits. 

 

 

 The emphasis on Google Plus has its critics, but the majority consensus is that the tie-in with the new search changes makes the most sense from a business standpoint. Internet marketing experts are already predicting that optimized content on a Google Plus page is going to carry more weight than if the same content were placed elsewhere on the web. Contrary to some initial fears, this practice will not mean the end of SEO as web authors know it. The three components of personal results, profiles in search, and people and places instead serves to encourage and reinforce the best methods of both optimizing and sharing content socially.

 

 

 

From the Official Google Blog

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.

Search is pretty amazing at finding that one needle in a haystack of billions of webpages, images, videos, news and much more. But clearly, that isn’t enough. You should also be able to find your own stuff on the web, the people you know and things they’ve shared with you, as well as the people you don’t know but might want to… all from one search box.

We’re transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships. We began this transformation with Social Search, and today we’re taking another big step in this direction by introducing three new features:

1. 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; 
2. 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, 
3. 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. 

Together, these features combine to create Search plus Your World. Search is simply better with your world in it, and we’re just getting started.

Personal Results
Say you’re looking for a vacation destination. You can of course search the web, but what if you want to learn from the experiences your friends have had on their vacations? Just as in real life, your friends’ experiences are often so much more meaningful to you than impersonal content on the web. With your world in search, you can find:

• Google+ posts. You can find relevant Google+ posts from friends talking about an amazing trip they just took, whether they’ve shared privately with you or publicly. You’ll find links shared by your friends, such as activities, restaurants and other things they enjoyed on their trip. 
• Photos. You can find beautiful vacation photos from your friends right in your search results page. You can also find your own private photos from Google+ and Picasa, based on captions, comments and album title. 

Personal Results: a family story 
As a child, my favorite fruit was Chikoo, which is exceptionally sweet and tasty. A few years back when getting a family dog, we decided to name our sweet little puppy after my favorite fruit. Over the years we have privately shared many pictures of Chikoo (our dog) with our family. To me, the query [chikoo] means two very sweet and different things, and today’s improvements give me the magical experience of finding both the Chikoos I love, right in the results page.

This is search that truly knows me, and gives me a result page that only I can see. And while I get a nice mix of personal results with results from the web, I can also click the link at the top of the results page (red arrow) for the option to search only within my world.

Profiles in Search 
Every day, there are hundreds of millions of searches for people. Sometimes, it’s hard to find the person you’re looking for. Once you do find him or her, there’s no quick way for you to actually interact. Starting today, you’ll have meaningful ways to connect with people instantly, right from the search results.

Now, typing just the first few letters of your friend’s name brings up a personalized profile prediction in autocomplete. Selecting a predicted profile takes you to a results page for your friend, which includes information from their Google+ profile and relevant web results that may be related to them. And you can have this personal experience instantaneously, thanks to Google Instant. So when I search for [ben smith], I now find my dear friend Ben every time, instead of the hundreds of other Ben Smiths out there (no offense to all of them!).

In addition, you’ll find profile autocomplete predictions for various prominent people from Google+, such as high-quality authors from our authorship pilot program.

Once you select that profile, if you’re a signed-in Google+ user, you’ll also see a button to add them to your circles right on your search results page.

People and Pages 
As I mentioned earlier, behind most queries are communities. Starting today, if you search for a topic like [music] or [baseball], you might see prominent people who frequently discuss this topic on Google+ appearing on the right-hand side of the results page. You can connect with them on Google+, strike up meaningful conversations and discover entire communities in a way that simply wasn’t possible before.

Unprecedented security, transparency and control 
When it comes to security and privacy, we set a high bar for Search plus Your World. Since some of the information you’ll now find in search results, including Google+ posts and private photos, is already secured by SSL encryption on Google+, we have decided that the results page should also have the same level of security and privacy protection. That’s part of why we were the first major search engine to turn on search via SSL by default for signed-in users last year. This means when you’re signed in to Google, your search results—including your private content—are protected by the same high standards of encryption as your messages in Gmail.

We also want to be transparent about how our features work and give you control over how to use them. With today’s changes, we provide interface elements and control settings like those you’ll find in Google+. For example, personal results are clearly marked as Public, Limited or Only you. Additionally, people in your results are clearly marked with the Google+ circle they are in, or as suggested connections.

We’re also introducing a prominent new toggle on the upper right of the results page where you can see what your search results look like without personal content. With a single click, you can see an unpersonalized view of search results.

That means no results from your friends, no private information and no personalization of results based on your Web History. This toggle button works for an individual search session, but you can also make this the default in your Search Settings. We provide separate control in Search Settings over other contextual signals we use, including location and language.

That’s unprecedented transparency and control over personal search results.

A beautiful journey begins 
Search plus Your World will become available over the next few days to people who are signed in and searching on https://www.google.com in English.

While there may be 7 billion people and 197 million square miles on Earth, a septillion stars and a trillion webpages, we spend our short, precious lives living in a particular town, with particular friends and family, orbiting a single star and relying on a tiny slice of the world’s information. Our dream is to have technology enable everyone to experience the richness of all their information and people around them.

We named our company after the mathematical number googol as an aspiration toward indexing the countless answers on webpages, but that’s only part of the picture. The other part is people, and that’s what Search plus Your World is all about.
Posted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow

+Tim Capper

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