Google’s mission is to “organise the world’s information” and it has done a fine job over the past decade or so by bringing order to the web’s trillion+ pages. But the web has changed since Google was incorporated in 1998. The web is no longer static and the content that makes up the internet has been democratised. Instead of a minority updating the internet, now everyone in the world can potentially impact the make-up of the web. The web is now social.
Google's social search could give more prominence to its social network, Google+
So Google has launched Search plus Your World to make its search results more personal in response to the rise of the social web. It wants to do this to make sure the best and most relevant results are returned. The search giant will now include social data from its fledgling social network Google+ to complement search results, complete with information from people’s social graph. Now if someone wants to find information about a car, they will not only get links to pages of car manufacturers, but also comments, pictures and other content about cars from their Google+ network at the top of the page.
There are critics of Google’s move and many say it’s twisting search results in order to boost its own social network. Twitter’s general counsel Alex Macgillivray has been vocal and said it’s a “bad day for the internet”. Twitter expects that its own content will be sidelined and that Google+ will be given undue prominence in search results. But Google cannot index content from Facebook and Twitter as the networks do not allow it to crawl their pages for data.
For many, Google is the gateway to the internet and how they find information on events, their passions and products. So for brands, social search will be important because it adds another factor to the way Google ranks pages for different keywords. We might see some brands being forced to reconsider the importance of Google+ as a social network to reach out to their target audience – because Google has played its trump card to make it significant: search.
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