It appears that at some point, Google stopped labeling personalized search results based on its “Search Plus Your World” feature.
Are you still seeing personal results labeled as such? Have you noticed the disappearance? Let us know in the comments.
Google launched Search Plus Your World back in January of 2012. The reaction from users was mixed.You can toggle the feature on and off with these buttons:
In the past, since launching the feature, Google has shown the little person icon next to the results that were included as a result of it – the personalized results that others don’t see. Now, Google is not showing these icons to indicate personalization on these results.
You can see in the video how they were labeled:
Here’s Google’s page about the Search Plus Your World feature as it currently stands on the company’s Inside Search site. You can see the icons in the example images.
Now, no icons.
Here’s an example of a generic search for “game” with personalization turned on. I’ve highlighted the obviously personalized results, which are based on Google+ connections.
Here’s the same search with personalization turned off:
It’s also worth noting that Google is showing me a Google Play link with personalization turned on (at the bottom), which doesn’t appear with it turned off. Perhaps this is because I have an Android device. Also, Google is showing an ad the top on the non-personalized results that isn’t present on the personalized results.
As seen in the video, the mouseover text for the personalization icon at the top used to say, “Show personal results.” Now, the text says, “Show all results,” when it’s turned off, and “Currently showing private results” when it’s turned on.
I’m not sure how long ago Google stopped showing the icons. I don’t know if I’m the first to point this out or not. I didn’t see any mentions of it, but please feel free to let us know if you’ve noticed this in the past. If this isn’t news, and I somehow missed it when it was, I apologize, but searching Google is giving me no indication that it’s been a topic of discussion, so if that’s the case, perhaps Google burying this is a story in and of itself.
It’s unclear at this point if Google has stopped labeling these results for all users, or if it is just testing the lack of labels, but I had multiple people test it, and none of them were seeing the labels. We’ve reached out to Google for comment, and they don’t appear to be interested in responding. We’ll update if that changes.
For Google, which often talks about being more transparent, this seems like a bit of a reduction in transparency. Kind of like when they decided to stop putting out those monthly lists of algorithm changes or “search quality highlights” a while back without saying anything about it.
A Pew report from March of last year found that 65% of those polled view personalized search as bad, and 73% saw it as a violation of privacy. That sounds like the kind of thing that people would want to continue to see clearly labeled at least.
Google has announced a handful of “search engine of the future” items. One involves the international expansion of the Knowledge Graph and the addition of Knowledge Graph results to search suggestions. One is about improved Voice Search for iOS. More on these things shortly.
Perhaps the most interesting of Google’s announcements is the addition of Gmail inbox content to Google’s search results. Frankly, I’m surprised Google didn’t do this a long time ago, though it will likely ruffle some feathers among the privacy advocates.
Google is introducing the feature on a totally opt-in basis, however. They’re offering a limited trial where you can sign up to get info from your Gmail from the main Google search box.
“Sometimes the best answer to your question isn’t available on the public web—it may be contained somewhere else, such as in your email,” Google’s Amit Singhal said in a blog post. “We think you shouldn’t have to be your own mini-search engine to find the most useful information—it should just work. A search is a search, and we want our results to be truly universal. So we’re developing a way to find this information for you that’s useful and unobtrusive, and we’d love your feedback.”
“We’re working on some even more useful features,” he said. “For example, if you search for [my flights] we will organize flight confirmation emails for any upcoming trips in a beautifully easy-to-read way right on the search results page.”
Earlier this year, Google consolidated its privacy policies into one main policy spanning across Google products, enabling the company to transfer data from one product to the next, under one Google account. This was likely a factor in turning this feature into a reality, and I’d expect more such features to make their way to the public eye, incorporating data from even more Google products into search results.
When Gmail first came out, it was revolutionary because of the amount of storage it gave users. Over time, many users have kept ridiculous amounts of email on file, available from the Gmail search box. Now, all of that content can be surfaced right from a search box. If Google can get the relevancy right, this could be a major step forward for Google Search, provided people actually use it.
It will be interesting to see if Google keeps the feature an opt-in option in the long term.
This feature seems like it would make better use of the “Search Plus Your World” title than the actual Search Plus Your World feature Google launched earlier this year.
Google Developer Programs Tech Lead Maile Ohye posted a twenty-minute video about Google+ and the +1 button to the Webmaster Central blog today. For many of you, there’s not going to be a whole lot of new info. It’s really about the basics, and how it all works, apparently geared toward people who have yet to navigate the path that is Google+.
While much of the video talks about the general features and functionality of Google+, eventually Ohye talks specifically about how it all plays into search. Again, there’s not much in the way of new information, but it does give another Google perspective about how it is using Google+ and +1s to show search results to users.
“Because our goal is to return the most relevant results to users, it doesn’t matter if you participate in Google+ or not,” Ohye says. “You can completely ignore Google+ and all of that information and still do great with Search because it’s about returning the most relevant results.”
She goes on to talk about Search Plus Your World, and how Google uses your Google+ Circles to show you results based on stuff people you “trust” have engaged with.
Then, she gets into identity, which is really what it’s all about.
“So, let’s take the concept of identity,” says Ohye. “Imagine you have a website here and it’s all in this blue box. And you have things like page A and page B. And then, instead of just having this website, you have more with identity because you have a Google+ badge that says that we have a Google+ page. And even more than that, you might have page A and say that page A actually tied to the identity of this author. And page B is tied to the identity of this author. So, rather than just a standalone website, you now have more identity with your Google+ page and two different author profiles. Once you have this identity established, you can really then start to build your reputation.”
Speaking about a site, she says, “First of all, it might have more websites on the web linking to you. And that’s great and helps build your reputation. But additionally, because you have that Google+ page, you have people in Google+ that might be following your business. And then, you have people who follow the people who follow your business. And even furthermore, you might have a page like page A showing in search results. And that looks great. And you might have users who actually plus oned that content and say that they recommend it. And in addition to those users who liked that content, you have those who follow the users who liked that content. And you can see how this network starts to grow.”
“You might have page A again and it also has an author, like Othar, who also works at Google–great guy. He might have wrote page A. And he also has people who follow him. So again, it’s creating this entire network and helping to build your site and your great reputation.
“So, how does this work out for users in terms of their reaching the most relevant content?” asks Ohye. “Well, at the ranking time, it helps us to serve better, more tailored results because users can say, ‘Yes. I want this page.’ Or, ‘I agree with this page,’ and plus one it. It kind of develops your reputation. The next part after ranking is what the actual search result looks like on the page. And with this information, we can now highlight the utility of the result. So, your content can stand out by saying you have people plus one it and also by having great authors. And the last part, of course, is the click. And that’s where they come to your site and they find that useful information.”
Google has done a whole lot in the past five years. In the past year and a half or so, they launched two major algorithmic changes in Panda and Penguin, designed to surface higher quality content and reduce the clutter of webpsam. There have been a lot of complaints about both updates, but Google seems to think they have been successful.
Page spoke at Zeitgeist 2012 this week, talking about a number of things, and wearing the famous Google glasses (or glass, if you prefer).
“I think that’s a really big area of focus for us,” Page said, regarding search. That’s good to know. Google is still focused on search (in case you’ve been distracted by fancy future glasses, cars that drive themselves, and that sort of thing).
Page spoke about the ways Google is getting better at search (though I’m not sure everyone completely agrees on that, based on many of the comments we see on a daily basis).
“It’s an area where, you know, I think if you used Google from five years ago, you’d be astounded by how bad it is. Or how bad it was,” Page said. He then talked about things like Google’s Search Plus Your World personalized results and the recently launched knowledge graph.
Search Plus Your World would be referring to Google’s big personalized search push, launched earlier this year. It draws heavily on the user’s Google+ connections, as well as various other social connections (though missing valuable personal data from networks like Facebook and Twitter).
Knowledge Graph is what Google a launched last week, designed to help users find the things they’re actually looking for without having to click over to other sites (and to distinguish between queries with more than one meaning – such as Tesla the scientist vs. Tesla the car company vs. Tesla the rock band).
While we’ve seen plenty of complaints about Search Plus Your World, I can’t honestly say I’ve seen many about Knowledge Graph.
“Search has gotten a lot better,” said Page. “You don’t always see it, because we change it every day, and we try not to distract you too much with changes, but I think one of the things I’m most proud of that we did recently is that I have a friend at Google named Ben Smith, and that’s a very common name in the U.S. You know, Smith’s the most common last name. And it was very difficult to find him before. But now actually, with Google+ and with our understanding of all that, when I search for ‘Ben Smith,’ I actually get the Ben Smith that I know, and he actually appears in the search box. There’s a little picture of him, and if that’s not the Ben Smith I want, I can, you know, delete him, and put a different one in. But I’m actually searching for that person, rather than the sting – the combination of letters, and that’s a really big deal for Google.”
He says they’re calling the Knowledge Graph boxes “knowledge panels.”
“What we’re really trying to do is get to the point where we can represent knowledge, and we can do much more complicated types of queries,” said Page. “What are the 20 deepest lakes? What are the highest market cap companies? Whatever. Things like that. Things where we really understand what that query means, rather than just give you the exact text that matches best on some webpage somewhere, and so we’re really looking at synthesizing knowledge, and I’m incredibly excited about that.”
Interestingly, since the Knowledge Graph was introduced, there seems to be less emphasis on Google+ content from Google’s SERPs in some cases. For example, before, with Search Plus Your World, a search for “music” might have brought up the Google+ profiles of random artists in a box on the side, but now, that query will bring up knowledge graph results for people. From there, you can click on the artist you want, where you’ll be directed to a different SERP specifically for that artist.
When you are on the SERP for a particular person, however, you might see Google+ profiles. This is the case with Mark Zuckerberg, for example.
Beyond algorithm updates, Google has made at least two major changes to its search engine this year: Search Plus Your World and the Knowledge Graph. The former was designed to offer users a search experience more tailored to their own personal web experience and social connections. The latter was designed to give users the info they’re looking for without having to click off the results page to another site (while helping Google understand the meaning of the search in cases where there are more than one meaning).
When Search Plus Your World launched, it came with boxes on the right-hand side of some results pages. These were called “People and Pages” boxes. As Matt McGee at Search Engine Land points out, the new Knowledge Graph boxes (which CEO Larry Page calls “Knowledge Panels”) have replaced the “People and Pages” boxes.
Before, for example, when you searched for a term like “music,” Google would show the “People and Pages” box, highlighting specific musicians’ profiles on Google+. Now, they’ll show specific musicians, but rather encourage you to click, bringing up another search results page for that musician (complete with that musician’s own personal knowledge panel).
If you click on Chris Brown from there, you get something like:
So, that’s one way Google has toned down the Google+ in its search results. Of course, with this strategy, Google can point you to a page with an AdWords ad for an “ad related to Chris Brown”. Google+ still doesn’t have ads, so financially, this should work better for Google.
In March, Google made an algorithmic change, which seemed to favor Google+ profiles less as well. That changed was billed as:
Better indexing of profile pages. [launch codename “Prof-2”] This change improves the comprehensiveness of public profile pages in our index from more than two-hundred social sites.
When Search Plus Your World first launched, Twitter complained about Google favoring Google+ pages over more relevant Twitter pages. The aforementioned change seemed to have remedied that. Google+ profiles seemed to be ranking over more relevant profiles in less cases.
Another famous example was when Google was ranking Mark Zuckerberg’s Google+ profile over his Facebook profile. That was also no longer the case. However, the Knowledge Graph has thrust Zuck’s content free Google+ profile back into the spotlight:
If you click on the picture of Zuckerberg in the Knowledge Panel, it takes you to his Google+ profile, though the Facebook Profile still ranks over the Google+ profile in the organic results.
Google launched Search Plus Your World earlier this year. Most Google users probably just know it as Google filling their results with a lot more results based on social connections. A lot of users complained about it, but Google appears to consider the whole thing a success (not unlike the Penguin update).
Google Fellow Amit Singhal spoke at SMX London this morning, and talked about the feature, and search personalization in general.
Daniel Waisberg at SMX sister site Search Engine Land liveblogged Singhal’s on-stage discussion with Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman. Singhal indicated that the SPYW is actually increasing search result clicks, and that the filter bubble is not much of an issue. From Waisberg’s liveblog:
Amit says the key motivation behind Search Plus Your World is to have a secured search, it is the first baby step to achieve Google’s dream, and data shows that Google users like the personal results. It also gives the user one click removal from their personalized results. Google is currently analyzing and improving their personalization engine.
Chris mentions that personalization can be narrowing, as it gives people the same results and they do not discover new things. Amit answers that there should be different points of views in any search results, and Google is aware of that and they balance between personalized and non-personalized results.
Danny mentions a Pew research that concluded that people do not want personalization. Amit says “I am a scientist, when I look at researches I look at how the question was asked.” He discussed the specific research, and said that personalization is valuable for Google users. Danny asks: can you tell what percentage of personalized searches are clicked? Amit says people are clicking more than before on searches and it is lifting CTR from search pages. Chris mentions Bing Social efforts and how it is different from Google’s. Amit says: “the key challenge with personalization is that no one can judge a personalized search for someone else.” That’s why Google looks at the data about how users like their results. Search Plus Your World is the same approach as Universal Search, people have to find what they intend to find on their results.
There hasn’t been much indicating that Google will be gaining access to the Facebook and Twitter data anytime soon. The subject was mentioned briefly during the SMX London discussion. Waisberg liveblogs: “Danny mentions the integration Bing did with Twitter and Facebook, and how this might be good for users. Will Google do that in the future? Amit said that their contract with Twitter expired. Google cannot add Twitter and Facebook right now as their information is hidden behind a wall. It has been tough to build an integration in this terms.”
The good news is that at least Twitter and Google are talking frequently. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo was recently quoted as saying, “We continue to talk to Google frequently and on an ongoing basis. They are a company that’s doing several different things right now. Those conversations have a complexity to them that is different than our conversations with the company.”
Google finally announced the official launch of Google Drive today, after years of anticipation. What do you suppose the chances are that Google will integrate your stored files into search results when relevant? We asked Google if they have such plans. “We have nothing to announce at this time,” a Google spokesperson tells us.
Not exactly a no.
Think about how much Google already does to personalize your search results. The launch of Search Plus Your World, earlier this year, is a bold example of this. Google bases relevancy, to some extent, on your personal connections with others. Why not your personal collection of files? What’s more personal than that?
Google is giving users 5 GB of free storage, and even more if you’re willing to pay (25 GB for $2.49 per month, 100 GB for $4.99 per month and 1 TB for $49.99 per month ). You can store a lot of files for 1TB. A lot of documents (it’s tied to Google Docs). Google wants to organize the world’s information, and it clearly wants to personalize the user’s experience in ways that are relevant to them, so I can’t see why Google wouldn’t integrate this into search in one way or another. Likewise for Google Music.
Google has spent a significant amount of time, particularly since the launch of Google+, casting its products basically as features of one greater Google. The company’s recently revised privacy policy emphasizes this even more. Google already stores a lot of your stuff, and Google Drive will increase that a great deal for some users. Why not add Google Drive, Google Music, and even Gmail content into the mix, when relevant? That is, if they can get it right.
That’s really the question. Can they? They were confident enough in Search Plus Your World as getting social search right. But there have been plenty of complaints regarding its impact on relevancy. I can see adding one’s personal files into the mix in such a way as sparking similar criticism.
It’s not even about privacy. Google already has your files, and with its new privacy policy, it can share data from one Google service to the next. That doesn’t mean they’re sharing it with anybody else. The policy, however, would seemingly make it easy for Google to provide such an offering.
How well it would be received, would probably be based in large part on how it was implemented. I have to wonder: if Google had launched its personalized Search Plus Your World results more in a Wajam-like fashion, where they’re not as intrusive into the regular search experience, would people have been so critical?
There’s another personalized search application called Greplin, which kind of does the kind of thing we’re talking about here. It will let you search through Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Google Docs and various other services. I can see Google offering something similar based on its own products in which people have files, documents, or conversations in which they may wish to find.
This is all speculative, of course. It’s a what if scenario at this point. But, what if? Would you find such a service useful or would it just get in the way? Maybe we’ll see one day soon, or maybe it will never happen. What do you think? Wouldn’t that truly be Search Plus YOUR World?
Google does emphasize Google Drive’s search as one of its key features. Here’s what Google’s announcement says about that:
Search everything. Search by keyword and filter by file type, owner and more. Drive can even recognize text in scanned documents using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology. Let’s say you upload a scanned image of an old newspaper clipping. You can search for a word from the text of the actual article. We also use image recognition so that if you drag and drop photos from your Grand Canyon trip into Drive, you can later search for [grand canyon] and photos of its gorges should pop up. This technology is still in its early stages, and we expect it to get better over time.
Some people like personalized search results based on their social connections. Some don’t. Google thrust Search Plus Your World upon users earlier this year, to mixed reviews. While it has an on/off toggle, it has littered search results with more content based on what people you may be connected via various social networks (like Google+ – not Facebook/Twitter) have shared.
Last week, I wrote a post asking if social is really a good signal for relevancy? My conclusion is that while it can help in some kinds of searches, is not necessarily helpful for all kinds. While knowing what hotel in Chicago my friend recommends might be useful to me, knowing which article about Mitt Romney he gave a thumbs up to, isn’t necessarily what I’m looking for.
Google sprinkles in these results, and social signals influence rankings. I’ve written about Wajam’s efforts in personalized/social search more favorably in the past. One thing that is very different about this, that it gives users a designated spot for these kinds of results. You can glance and see if there’s anything interesting there (plus includes Facebook/Twitter connections), but it doesn’t insert them where it thinks they are most relevant throughout the organic search results.
Today, Wajam announced a new version of its social experience for Google.
“Learning from hundreds of thousands of users who made hundreds of millions of searches, we redesigned the whole user experience and packaged it in a convenient, unobtrusive new design that removes clutter from your search results page,” says Wajam’s Alain Wong.
“The new design clearly breaks down number of results, organizing them by links, photos or videos, and lines up specific friends who have commented on the search term you searched,” adds Wong. “This gives you the ability to more easily filter results by specific friends, relevance or time.”
It’s clear that titles matter to search. You’re less likely to rank well in search engines for key phrases if those phrases are not in the title of your content. It’s also clear that search engines are putting a great deal of emphasis on social signals when ranking content. Interestingly enough, titles also have a direct impact on just how much your content will be shared socially.
Earlier this year, there was a story from Forbes, which got some attention in the press. It was covering something that was already covered by the New York Times, but the Forbes version with the more provocative title reportedly got shared a lot more, and as a result received a lot more traffic. Nick O’Neill wrote an interesting piece talking about this, which I followed up with my own take on the discussion.
The main point is that the title can make a world of difference. Having the right words in the title of an article can be the difference between 30 pageviews or 300 pageviews. It can be the difference between 1,000 pageviews or 50,000 pageviews.
It’s possible to get a lot of shares based on great content with a not-so-great title, but it’s a lot harder. I also believe a lot of people share content based on the title without even reading the article. Titles matter. A lot.
There’s something about this, however, that doesn’t quite sit entirely well, with regards to the increased emphasis search engines are placing on social signals for relevancy. Here, you’ll find Bing’s Duane Forrester talking up the importance of social. Google, as you may know, launched Search Plus Your World, the highly personalized (based on social signals) version of Google search that favors content you have a social connection to.
Google’s +1 system is all about a social connection to an article, to send Google a signal. If I +1 a piece of content and share it to Google+, I’m not only sharing it with my followers, I’m endorsing that piece of content as being something Google should be ranking well. The problem with that is that I may like that piece of content, and so may many others, but that does not necessarily make it better than some other great piece of content out there on the web that is similar, and just hasn’t found its way in front of my (and others’) eyeballs. Perhaps that other, better (more relevant to a potential search) piece of content just didn’t have as catchy a title, and didn’t inspire as much sharing because of it.
We don’t know how much weight Google gives to any singular signal (it has over 200). However, we can see various changes Google makes that do put social in the spotlight. The +1 button and Search Plus Your World are obviously two major components, but there are plenty of more subtle things. There were a few, for instance, in Google’s list of algorithm changes in March:
Better indexing of profile pages. [launch codename “Prof-2”] This change improves the comprehensiveness of public profile pages in our index from more than two-hundred social sites.
Updates to personalization signals. [project codename “PSearch”] This change updates signals used to personalize search results.
+1 button in search for more countries and domains. This month we’ve internationalized the +1 button on the search results page to additional languages and domains. The +1 button in search makes it easy to share recommendations with the world right from your search results. As we said in our initial blog post, the beauty of +1’s is their relevance—you get the right recommendations (because they come from people who matter to you), at the right time (when you are actually looking for information about that topic) and in the right format (your search results).
We discussed that first one in a separate article. It seems that Google+ profiles aren’t getting quite the special treatment that they were when SPYW first launched, but it clearly places great emphasis on social, with “improved comprehensiveness” related to 200 social sites.
The second one up there is very vague. Updates to signals used to personalize search results. I could be wrong, but something tells me the update wasn’t about making things less personalized (social, being a big factor in Google’s personalization).
Third, the expansion of the +1 is a no brainer. The title isn’t as likely to influence a +1 from the search result page, as a share on Google+ itself might be, for example, but it inspires more use of that social signal.
“The beauty of +1’s is their relevance,” Google says, but how many are driven because of a catchy title of an article the user didn’t even bother to read. Even if they did read it, who’s to say it wasn’t shared with them in the first place because it had a catchier title than some other publication that may have been competing for that user’s attention.
While it has the added value of sending a signal to Google search, we can probably agree that for all intents and purposes, the +1 button is Google’s (Google+’s) version of the Facebook like button. How many times have you “liked” a link shared on Facebook based on the title without reading the article? What if by simply doing that, you were getting that content (which may or may not have been a total piece of crap article) favored more in search engines just because of some title-based likes. What if that was ranking higher than a really thoughtful and original piece on the same topic, and was really much more suitable to searchers’ needs?
And that doesn’t even take into consideration the potential for real abuse. SEO strategist Trond Lyngbø wrote an interesting article talking about all of that. Most people blindly liking an article without reading it aren’t trying to promote a particular site or game search. But there are plenty who are.
For better or worse, it doesn’t look like social signals will play any less of a role in search engines for the foreseeable future. While titles should be relevant to the topic at hand (usually with relevant key words), you’d be wise not to undervalue the shareability of a headline.
As an added benefit, even if this doesn’t translate into the search visibility you’re hoping for, if it’s being shared a lot on various social networks, there’s a good chance you will hardly miss the search traffic anyway. It’s better to diversify your traffic sources anyway. You don’t want to be too dependent on Google or any other one source of traffic. Any Panda victim can tell you that. Good titles that inspire sharing can help a great deal in getting shared through multiple social channels.
A lot of people complained about Search Plus Your World when it was announced. The fact is, some people just don’t find results to be more helpful just because someone they know interacted with them. For many, that probably goes tenfold for people they’ve interacted with on Google+, as opposed to Facebook, where all of their friends and family are regularly networking. But that’s really beside the point.
Do social signals really make results more relevant. It’s possible that they do in some niches more than others. Some +1’s from friends who have stayed at a certain hotel in a city you’re getting ready to travel to, for instance, could make make a difference in relevancy. Likewise for restaurants, products, and probably some other things, but that’s not going to necessarily go for all pieces of information on the web. It’s not always going to work for articles. Think about political bias. Believe it or not, there are still liberals and conservatives who maintain friendships, though may have very different tastes in reading material.
For webmasters, there are issues with social being weighed to heavily as well. In addition to the points I’ve already made about one’s good content being trumped by someone else’s bad content with a better title, there is the fact that webmasters bend over backwards and jump through hoops trying to play by the rules set by the search engines – including the good optimization tactics that Google actually promotes, but should all of this be trumped by social connections? Do you risk having your content reach less people because one guy on Google+ has a lot of followers, and he happened to +1 a competing piece of content?
What do you think? Do you think search engines are putting too much emphasis on social signals? Let us know in the comments.
Google launched a big redesign of Google+ on Wednesday. It’s in the process of rolling it out over the next few days. A Google spokesperson tells WebProNews, “The new version of Google+ will gradually start rolling out to all Google+ users globally this morning.”
“We think you’ll find it easier to use and nicer to look at, but most importantly, it accelerates our efforts to create a simpler, more beautiful Google,” says Vic Gundotra, one of the main brains behind Google+, in a post on Google+ itself.
The most noticeable change is the navigation, which is now on the left-hand side and can be manipulated by the user. You can move apps around to the order you want them in, hover over apps to see options, and show/hide apps by moving them to the “more” section.
“Taken together, these powers make it easier to access your favorites, and to adjust your preferences over time,” Gundotra says on the Google blog. “We’ve also built the ribbon with the future in mind, giving us an obvious (and clutter-free) space for The Next Big Feature, and The Feature After That. So stay tuned.”
Here’s what it looks like and a couple of videos Google posted, demoing the new layout:
The “What’s Hot” section has become part of a greater “Explore” section, which also points you to Google+ trends, and lets you view “ripples” on various posts in the stream (granted, it already did this).
There’s more emphasis on Hangouts. There’s a dedicated page just for Hangouts, including a list of invitations from people in your circles, easy access to every public/on air hangout, and what Google describes as “a rotating billboard of popular hangouts, pro tips and other items you don’t want to miss.”
For webmasters, developers, and those in marketing and/or in publishing, Google itself hosts a lot of useful hangouts that you will probably be able to find in this section. In fact, this feature could be huge for content discoverability and make Google+ a great deal more useful for video content alone. I’d look for future YouTube integrations in this department.
Photography is another majar area of focus, and with good reason. Google presents the photo upgrades along with conversation upgrades, and that makes a great deal of sense. As you probably know, Facebook just bought Instagram, which is as much a social network as a photo app. Instagram (as well as Flickr and others over the years) have proven that conversation goes hand in hand with photography. It’s for this reason that Google+ has already been so popular among photographers, though the integration of PIcasa Web Albums and the instant upload feature have probably helped too.
Photos are an incredibly important part of social media, and certainly are strategically for the companies operating the social networks. Photos attract users, and they attract those users’ friends. It’s a simple as that. The better photo experience a user gets, the more likely they are to continue using that service, and showing their photos to said friends (and family), thereby promoting that service.
So, the new features in this department, are: full bleed photos and videos, a stream of “conversation cards” and an “activity drawer” highlighting the community around your content, as Google puts it.
Dylan Casey says: “New Google+ looks great. Solves the mess at the top. BTW, where is ‘my’ Google Bar?”
Cesar Gemelli says, “Maybe this #newgoogleplus will increase my productivity…”
Ben Umpleby says, “Ahhh, pretty new facelift, #newgoogleplus. Let’s see if this becomes any more fun than before. I got kind of tired of the drab look of the previous version.”
Not everyone loves it, of course.
Holly Melton says, “Not loving that the #newgoogleplus pushes everything to the left side of my screen…”
Isriya Paireepairit writes, “Please consider my proposal with the #newgoogleplus space utilization problem. You will see the space is wasted badly. In the world of widescreen laptop with short height, vertical content display space is expensive. My screen is 1280×800 and you want to allow me using only ~27% of my screen?”
He shows the following image to demonstrate his point:
It’s interesting to see the reactions on Twitter, given that not all Twitters are Google+ users. I was surprised at how many positive things were being said, in proportion to the negative things I was coming across. We often talk about Facebook being a major rival to Google, but we’ve also talked about Twitter as a competitor in the past as well, and Twitter has just as much to lose as Facebook, in terms of where users are spending their time, so it’s worth noting that Google is impressing a number of Twitter users.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think this translates to people saying, “OK, forget Twitter, I’m only using Google+ now,” or “Finally, I can stop using Facebook. Google+ has better navigation.” I’m just saying, the more Google can do to impress users of rival services, the better chance they have of capturing more of those users’ time using the web, which really means they have more opportunities to get ads or other Google services in front of them.
Update: I’ve seen a lot more of the negative feedback trickling in since this piece was first written. A lot more people seem to be taking issue with Google’s use of space, and with the design having too much white space. It has even led to the Google+ trend #usesforwhitespace.
The “More Beautiful Google”
With the announcement, the theme of Google+ as a social layer to the larger Google is continued, with an emphasis on how the company is working to create a “simpler, more beautiful Google”.
This is in large part, at least on the PR end of things, what Google’s recent privacy policy change was all about. It simply allows Google to more easily share data from Google service to Google service, as it relates to the user. In other words, it can use what you’ve done on YouTube to make your Google+ experience better, or vice versa, for example. Likewise for search.
Gundotra says at the end of the announcement, “By focusing on you, the people you care about, and the stuff you’re into, we’re going to continue upgrading all the features you already know and love—from Search and Maps to Gmail and YouTube.”Emphasis added.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that Google is looking for further integrations, and they no doubt have plenty of ideas up their sleeve already, but it’s noteworthy that he mentions search in particular right there. Earlier this year, Google launched Search Plus Your World, a new personalized way of delivering search results to users. While not exclusively Google+-based, there was a heavy emphasis on Google+ activity and profiles in search results.
The glaring holes in the experience were the lack of Twitter and Facebook data, which both companies complainedabout in their own ways. It seemed Google was giving preferential treatment to Google+, while sacrificing relevancy of results in some cases. It does seem, however, that Google has eased up on that a bit. A recent algorithm change announced by the company indicates they’re getting better at delivering relevant profiles, and based on some of the examples I’ve come across, I can’t deny that this is the case. It does seem better than it was.
But how can Google+ be used in search more effectively? Clearly, Google is not done integrating it in there.
“With Google+, we’re building a seamless and consistent social layer across Google,” the Google spokesperson tells us. “A critical piece of this layer is a design that scales to our future needs. Today’s foundational changes let us move even faster — toward a simpler, more beautiful Google,” the spokesperson says. “We’re just getting started.”
In Gundotra’s announcement, he says more than 170 million people have upgraded to Google+. Last month at SXSW, he indicated there are 100 million actives. Larry Page reaffirmed that number last week in a letter to investors. Does that mean that roughly 70 million are inactive with Google+ itself? We posed that question to Google, but no response on that one. I guess we’ll have to take that as a yes, unless 70 million people have become more active in the past week or so.
The good news, for Google, is that the actives outweigh the inactives, although Google’s description of what it considers an active user has been a topic of debate in itself. It’s someone who has used Google+ within 30 days of another Google service. That doesn’t mean people that are looking through their Google+ stream and engaging in conversations every day. It’s unclear whether the number includes people who have instant upload turned on, which simply uploads a photo to Google+ every time they take a picture with their phone.
I see a lot of people questioning how big Google+ really is, but I do know that a lot of the people who do use it, use it a lot. I have nearly 1,400 people in my Circles. That’s people that I follow. It’s not an enormous number, but it’s a lot of people, and I see a great deal of activity and conversation every time I look at my stream. Perhaps even more noteworthy – I see a lot of compelling content. A lot of great photos and videos. A lot of stuff worth sharing.
In the end, it doesn’t really matter if every user is using the actual Google+ stream or Google+ hangouts on a daily basis. As Google has presented it time and time again, it’s a social layer. Google doesn’t need you to use these specific features all the time. Google is using this to make everything it does more social, and more importantly (to Google, and potentially to advertisers), more personalized. According to Page, there are already over 120 integrations of Google+.
Google will hold its earnings call on Thursday, and the new Google+ will no doubt come up in the conversation. It will be interesting to see what Larry Page and Co. have to say about the further progression of Google.
Google is going to keep Google+ifying everything. We want to know if you think this is a good thing or a bad thing. Tell us in the comments.
In a letter to investors this week, Google CEO Larry Page expressed Google’s goal to create “a beautifully simple experience across Google”. That’s what the company’s controversial privacy policy change is all about. It’s about tying all of Google’s products together as one Google.
Should data from the various Google services you use be integrated with one another? Tell us what you think.
“Think about basic actions like sharing or recommendations,” wrote Page. “When you find a great article, you want to share that knowledge with people who will find it interesting, too. If you see a great movie, you want to recommend it to friends. Google+ makes sharing super easy by creating a social layer across all our products so users connect with the people who matter to them.”
“When you sign up for Google+, you can use Circles to group people into different categories, such as ‘Friends,’ ‘Family,’ or ‘Rocket Scientists,’ and then engage with them just like in real life,” he continued. “You can recommend great news articles, websites, and videos to specific Circles, or share photos with ‘Family’ straight from your Android device. And the photos are even uploaded for you automatically! To follow people with shared interests, such as photography, just add them to your Circles. And you can share your own ideas with the world, or a smaller group, via the Google+ Stream and have others respond.”
“It’s still early days, and we have a long way to go,” he noted. “But these are tremendously important changes, and with over 120 Google+ integrations to date (including Google Search, YouTube and Android), we are on the right track. Well over 100 million users are active on Google+, and we’re seeing a positive impact across the Web, with Google users being able to recommend search results and videos they like—a goal we’ve had ever since we started the company.”
Now imagine that Google+ had over 800 million users like Facebook. You might be surprised to know that in some ways it already does.
Google’s Vic Gundotra recently explained that Google counts active users as users who sign into Google+ and use another Google product within a month. Google may not be up to the 800 million mark in that regard (though they’re an 1/8 of the way there apparently – not bad for less than a year), but if Google+ is really just a social layer over Google products, you have to consider that Google has a lot more users than that. YouTube itself, in fact, has over 800 million.
Now consider that Facebook is working on its own search engine. It may only be internal (at least at first), but at 800 million users, even that in itself is enough to potentially take some searches away from Google. In a recent article on this subject, I wrote:
I’ve long maintained that the biggest threat to Google’s search market share is likely not the threat of a single competitor, but the diversification of search in general. People are using more apps than ever (from more devices than ever), and just don’t have to rely on Google (or other traditional search engines) for access to content the way they used to. Take Twitter search, for example, which has become the go-to destination for finding quick info on events and topics in real time. When was the last time you turned to Google’s realtime search feature? It’s been a while, because it’s been MIA since Google’s partnership with Twitter expired last year. Sometimes a Twitter search is simply more relevant than a Google search for new information, despite Google’s increased efforts in freshness.
One Googler told me he thought this paragraph was “dead-on”.
Even if Facebook doesn’t come out with an actual web search engine in the style of Google or Bing, significant improvements to Facebook search (with the right marketing behind it) could chip away a nice chunk of searches that would otherwise go to Google.
But, before we get too far off base here, the point is that Facebook as a whole is a direct competitor to Google as a whole. If you look at it from this perspective (which seems to be the way Google looks at it), search is just a feature. Facebook certainly favors Facebook results in Facebook searches. Web searches are only added on at the end via Bing.
“Activity on the Google+ Stream itself is increasing too,” said Page. “We’re excited about the tremendous speed with which some people have amassed over one million followers, as well as the depth of the discussions taking place among happy, passionate users—all evidence that we’re generating genuine engagement. When I post publicly I get a ton of high quality comments, which makes me happy and encourages me to keep posting. I strongly encourage all of you to follow me on Google+—I love having this new way to communicate and share with all of you!”
In a different portion of his letter called, “next-generation search,” Page basically discussed Search Plus Your World, and a bit about delivering more direct answers in results. Search Plus Your World, if you’re unfamiliar, is the personalization that Google launched earlier this year, which initially put a great deal more emphasis on Google+ content in search results.
It still does this, but Google seems to have toned it down a bit. At one point, Google was ranking Mark Zuckerberg’s Google+ Page over his public Facebook profile, which made no sense in terms of relevancy. Google was also ranking the WWE’s Google+ page over its Twitter account, even though the Twitter account was much more popular.
Better indexing of profile pages. [launch codename “Prof-2”] This change improves the comprehensiveness of public profile pages in our index from more than two-hundred social sites.
Plus, as another Googler recently told us, “Search plus Your World builds upon existing search features such as Social Search, personalized search, and authorship,” some of which Google has had in place for much longer. “You will continue to see existing Social Search features including +1s and content shared by your connections on Google+ and other sites. We’ll continue to look at your Google+ profile to see other content you’ve published online and linked to your profile.”
So what makes one profile more relevant than another? That’s a tricky question that Google is likely to continue to struggle with. It’s not always as easy as the Facebook CEO and his Facebook profile vs. his Google profile. It’s not necessarily as simple as which one has more followers either. The WWE’s Twitter account may have more followers than its Google+ account, but if you don’t use Twitter and you use Google+, the latter is most likely more relevant to you.
Google will likely continue to struggle with relevance vs. social/personalization. It must be hard to grow a social network when you have to promote a rival social network’s content ahead of the content from the one you’re trying to build. Facebook doesn’t have that problem. You wouldn’t go to Facebook and complain if you searched for “Larry Page” and it delivered you a Facebook Page for Larry Page rather than his Google+ profile.
So, as Google has already established itself for years as a web search engine, it faces some major hurdles in this chess match with Facebook that Facebook may not have to worry about, and even if both companies are headed to similar futures (at least in the social and search space), they come from very different backgrounds. They’re both working to the middle of one spectrum from opposite sides – Google from search moving towards social, and Facebook vice versa.
Facebook, at least has the social data to begin with, and is able to partner with another major search engine in Bing, along the way.
From Page’s letter, it is clear that Google is still more focused on search than on social as the overall strategy, with social simply being a means to improve search. But if Google+ is its social strategy, and Google is already favoring Google+ less in its search results, can Google win this battle? What do you think? Let us know in the comments.
In case you were thinking Google is more concerned with social than it is with search these days, perhaps Larry Page’s 2012 Update from the CEO will change your mind. You can find the word “social” used once. You can find the word “search” 23 times (OK, to be fair, Google+ is mentioned 10 times).
Under the heading “Next-Generation Search,” Page says that understanding identity and relationships can help Google improve search.
“Today, most search results are generic, so two strangers sitting next to each other in a café will get very similar answers,” he says. “Yet everyone’s life experiences are unique. We are all knowledgeable about different things; we have different interests and our preferences—for music, food, vacations, sports, movies, TV shows, and especially people—vary enormously.”
“Imagine how much better search would be if we added… you,” he adds. “Say you’ve been studying computer science for awhile like me, then the information you need won’t be that helpful to a relative novice and vice versa. If you’re searching for a particular person, you want the results for that person—not everyone else with the same name. These are hard problems to solve without knowing your identity, your interests, or the people you care about.”
From the sound of it, he basically considers Search Plus Your World, next-generation search.
He does say, “But this kind of next-generation search in which Google understands real-world entities—things, not strings—will help improve our results in exciting new ways. It’s about building genuine knowledge into our search engine.”
In fact, under another heading – “Taking Actions” – Page talks about how Google puts weather results right on the page, rather than just linking to weather sites. It’s this type of thing, by the way, that some sites aren’t incredibly fond of, and which could ultimately mean less traffic to more sites as Google expands this kind of result.
From there, he segues into Android (over 850K devices activated daily, 55 manufacturers and 300 carriers) and mobile search (with a little Google Wallet sprinkled in).
“Getting from needs to actions lightning fast is especially important on smaller devices like mobile phones, where screen size is limited and context really matters,” says Page. “That’s why I’m so excited about Android. Take Google Maps, one of our best-loved services. With it, you can search for something, perhaps the nearest bookstore, find it, and be shown the way straight there. And you can now turn your phone into a wallet using… Google Wallet. So you can tap, pay, and save while you shop. No more claiming you left your credit card at home when your friend asks you to pay for lunch!”
The letter gives you a sense of what Google is really trying to do in tying all of its products together (which is reflected in the big, controversial privacy policy update).
Better indexing of profile pages. [launch codename “Prof-2”] This change improves the comprehensiveness of public profile pages in our index from more than two-hundred social sites.
When Google launched Search Plus Your World (with increased Google+ integration), Twitter and Facebook threw respective fits. We documented the back and forththe companies exchanged. Basically, Twitter and Facebook (especially Twitter) weren’t happy that Google was showing Google+ profiles over Twitter profiles for certain queries, even though the Twitter profiles were more popular.
It was hard to argue with, though one can see the logic behind Google’s move, as it is trying to establish Google and Google+ as one great big network. If you were searching on Facebook for someone’s name, you would expect to get a Facebook profile first. So why not with Google?
Hint: the answer is that Google is known more as a web search engine, not a social network.
It appears that Google has remedied this, at least in some cases. Twitter specifically referenced an “@WWE” query when it was complaining. Twitter now shows up ahead of Google+ for “@WWE” (and just “WWE” for that matter).
We (and others) have also pointed out in the past that Google was showing Mark Zuckerberg’s Google+ page (which he does not use) ahead of his Facebook profile in a Google search for “mark zuckerberg”. Obviously, the Facebook profile (which he does use) is much more relevant. It appears that Google has remedied this as well.
As a matter of fact, Zuckerberg’s Google+ profile is completely gone from the front page for me now, where it was once the top result. That’s with Search Plus Your World toggled on, mind you. And I even have him in my Circles, so it would actually make sense for the profile to turn up somewhere on the page. Maybe they’ve gone too far in the opposite direction.
We’re not positive these particular instances were fixed with the aforementioned update from today’s list, but it’s worth noting in general that Google is getting better at this. Twitter and Facebook (and other networks) should be a little happier.
How far does your Google search query travel? According to Google,1,500 miles on average.
This is a factoid Google Fellow Ben Gomes dropped in an interview with ReadWriteWeb about the inner workings of Google Search. There wasn’t much in the way of new information revealed in the interview, but like Google’s own videos on the topic, it’s still interesting.
“The query is sent back to Google through the Internet,” Gomes told Jon Mitchell. “Typically, this is a journey of over 750 miles in either direction. We have data centers all over the world, but, on average, your query travels about 1,500 miles.”
The stat has been droppedby Google a few times before, but I’ve not seen much attention brought to it.
Google has data centers in:
Berkeley County, South Carolina
Council Bluffs, Iowa
Douglas County, Georgia
Mayes County, Oklahoma
Lenoir, North Carolina
The Dalles, Oregon
Hamina, Finland
St Ghislain, Belgium
Hong Kong
Singapore
On a side note, notice the poor relevancy of the results in the image. This is without “Search Plus Your World“. They’re not much better with it turned on.
Microsoft may or may not be involved with antitrust complaints against Google in Europe, related to Google+. Pretty vague, I know, but conflicting reports are painting it that way.
Reuters first reported: “Microsoft and several other companies have complained to EU antitrust regulators about Google’s social networking tool,” and that, “The complaints, which have not yet been filed formally with the Commission, may prompt the European Commission to broaden its ongoing investigation into Google, which focuses on whether it is too dominant in the web-search market.”
Reuters cites “people familiar with the matter”.
ZDNet has countered the Reuters report, indicating that Microsoft is “not involved in an antitrust complaint over Google+.” Reporter Mary Jo Foley cites a Microsoft spokesperson as saying, “We have not filed a complaint regarding Google+.”
Still, as you can see from the first Reuters quote above, it says that complaints “have not yet been filed,” so that doesn’t necessarily mean the report was false. Furthermore, that Reuters article also quotes a Microsoft spokesman as saying that the company had not filed a complaint.
So, it seems clear that no complaint has been filed, but apparently it’s still possible that formal complaints are in the works. I guess we’ll see if it happens.
Foley, while noting that Microsoft has sought other regulatory intervention against Google implies that Microsoft doesn’t have much of a vested interest in intervening against Google+, but Search Plus Your World could give Google an advantage to Google as a search engine, in terms of delivering personalized content to Google+ users. I’m not sure they would have much of a leg to stand on, however, since Bing has Facebook and Twitter data at its disposal.
A lot of people have complained about the relevancy of Google’s Search Plus Your World results anyway, though Google’s big privacy policy consolidation could enable the company to more freely integrate not just Google+ but all of its other products with one another, which could potentially make the search engine more personally relevant than ever.
Also, let’s not forget that Microsoft is part of the FairSearch Coalition, which aims to inspire regulatory intervention against Google at just about every turn. And what do you know? They just opened up shop in Europe.
Let me preface this by saying that I don’t consider myself to be part of the anti Search Plus Your World crowd. I think it has its pros and cons.
I will say that I don’t like when it leads to Google serving me less relevant results (which I think is happening more as a result of other algorithm tweaks as well). I searched for “mark zuckerberg” and Google returned me his Google+ profile as the very top result. Not his Facebook profile. His Google+ profile.
Any guesses as to how many Google+ updates Zuckerberg has shared publicly? Zero.
Any guesses as to how many Google+ updates Zuckerberg has shared with me personally? Same answer.
So how is Zuck’s Google+ profile supposed to help me as a user for such a general query? I don’t know. Perhaps Google is delivering this result because I do have Zuckerberg in a circle (in case he ever does make an update). I’m not sure, because when I try to test this by taking him out of the circle, Google doesn’t accept the removal. A bug I guess. Either way, if it’s because of the “personal connection” between Mark and myself, does that mean Google’s algorithm isn’t sophisticated enough to realize that there is virtually no content on Zuckerberg’s profile? Isn’t that against the rules of search quality, which Google has driven into the ground since the unleashing of the Panda update in 2011?
Of course it’s sophisticated enough.
Isn’t it also sophisticated enough to see that Mark and I have never actually exchanged a piece of information with one another via Google+?
Probably.
I don’t want to get into all of the talk about Google’s competitive practices here, because that’s not the part that bothers me as a user. It’s the whole making the results less usable thing.
As a Google user, I want integration among the various Google services I use. However, sometimes Search Plus Your World benefits the results, and sometimes it does not.
Update: A Google spokesperson tells WebProNews: “Like you wrote up in your article, it’s not new. Search plus Your World builds upon existing search features such as Social Search, personalized search, and authorship. You will continue to see existing Social Search features including +1s and content shared by your connections on Google+ and other sites. We’ll continue to look at your Google+ profile to see other content you’ve published online and linked to your profile.”
He shows a screen cap to back up his claim. It’s not the People and Places box or anything, but it does appear to show a social search result from Twitter, very similar to the recent injection of personalized Google+ connection results.
I’m not sure this is the result of any new offering from Google. They’ve had such social search features long before SPYW. See the “Social Connections and Content” section of your Google dashboard. This is basically the same connections you have listed on your Google Profile. So if you have your Twitter account connected, Google has that information, and can deliver you such results.
It’s not exactly the same as having access to the Firehose, which would blast all tweets into Google’s index in real time.
That said, SPYW has pretty much dominated those personalized search results with Google+ connections since it was announced, though Google made it clear, that it does in fact draw from other open web sources.
Still, Twitter raised a big stink about the whole thing, claiming Google was making Twitter results less visible. Many criticized the lack of non-Google sources in the People and Pages box in particular.
There have been reports of the relationship between Google and Twitter souring. Apparently the companies were supposed to have an Android-related conversation at the Consumer Electronics Show last month, but that didn’t happen, as Google’s SPYW raised the aforementioned stink.
It’s really not clear if this finding from Lurie is the result of any new developments. My guess is not. We’ve reached out to Google for comment, and will update accordingly.
Either way, it does show that Google will still show personalized Twitter results in some cases. That said, given Google’s increased emphasis on freshness, that firehose would be a lot more helpful.
Google announced this week that it is rolling out a new, main privacy policy that covers the majority of its products. The company is consolidating over 60 privacy notices into the main privacy policy. It’s keeping a few separate for “legal and other reasons”.
“Regulators globally have been calling for shorter, simpler privacy policies—and having one policy covering many different products is now fairly standard across the web,” Google says.
Google users have been receiving emails about the changes:
You know that whole “Google+ is Google.” mantra? Essentially what the new privacy policy means is that Google+ is in fact Google. It also means that Gmail is Google. YouTube is Google. Essentially, it affirms what we’ve been saying for quite some time. Google is the product, and all of Google’s services are basically features of that product – the way Facebook is the product, and the news feed, photos, videos, chat, etc. are features of that product.
In Google’s case, this concept embodies the majority of its products – the ones that aren’t being kept separate for “legal and other reasons”.
“The main change is for users with Google Accounts,” explains Alma Whitten, Director of Privacy, Product and Engineering at Google. “Our new Privacy Policy makes clear that, if you’re signed in, we may combine information you’ve provided from one service with information from other services. In short, we’ll treat you as a single user across all our products, which will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience.”
Whitten says Google’s “Search Plus Your World” (or SPYW) is a good example of what Google can do when its products are one. Not everyone agrees that that is a “good” example. In fact, the move has been highly controversial, as is the new approach to privacy.
“Today we can also do things like make it easy for you to read a memo from Google Docs right in your Gmail, or add someone from your Gmail contacts to a meeting in Google Calendar,” Whitten adds. “But there’s so much more that Google can do to help you by sharing more of your information with … well, you. We can make search better—figuring out what you really mean when you type in Apple, Jaguar or Pink.”
“We can provide more relevant ads too,” says Whitten. “For example, it’s January, but maybe you’re not a gym person, so fitness ads aren’t that useful to you. We can provide reminders that you’re going to be late for a meeting based on your location, your calendar and an understanding of what the traffic is like that day. Or ensure that our spelling suggestions, even for your friends’ names, are accurate because you’ve typed them before. People still have to do way too much heavy lifting, and we want to do a better job of helping them out.”
At best this will cause massive bad publicity at worst it could be the start of a slippery slope for Google. I think this one may even capture the general public’s attention.
Can’t opt out? People are going to bail out!
The question will be will gmail users opting in (to continue using the service)? How many are going to give up their established gmail accounts? I know many gmail users who do not use any other G products… and some with gmail that use bing for search. Will be interesting to see how this shakes out.
@jmathias james a mathiasre: Privacy; Google has been “tracking” us from day one. It just feels worse now because we use our real names online.7 minutes ago via web · powered by @socialditto
@ScottTShepherd Scott ShepherdAs an admitted #Google cheerleader, I just can’t get into a froth yet over privacy changes; assumed this was the direction all along.1 minute ago via web · powered by @socialditto
@TheRealSpaf Gene SpaffordGoogle dismisses criticism of its new privacy policy as “uninformed” & “overreaction”; also promote their new Google Android Endoscopy app.2 hours ago via Buffer · powered by @socialditto
The whole thing obviously bodes well for Google+ numbers. Google announced last week that Google+ has surpassed 90 million users. That’s a lot for the short time that’s been around, but it helps growth when it’s all tied to “the greater Google”. Sign up for a Google account now, and you’re signing up for Google+, Gmail, and nearly everything else.
That said, there are other forces at play for Google+ that could help that growth continue. It’s starting to break more into the mainstream. You have things like Anderson Cooper telling people to add him to their Circles. Remember when you first started to see TV shows tell people to follow them on Twitter? That helped Twitter immensely, no doubt. If more follow Cooper’s lead, that’s going to be huge for Google+. And with Google+‘s impact on search results, why wouldn’t more want to do this?
Google+” src=”http://cdn.ientry.com/sites/webpronews/pictures/ac360googleplus_616.jpg” title=”Anderson Cooper on Google+” class=”aligncenter” width=”616″ height=”406″ />
More celebrities are joining Google+ – another thing that helped Twitter gain steam. Lady Gaga, one of the biggest celebrities in pop culture, currently, just joined Google+ last week. Expect more and more to follow.
And of course, there’s good old fashioned advertising. Google, historically not a big television advertiser, is much more about some TV ads these days, including Google+ specific ads.
Competitive Strategy
We’ve written a number of times (including as recently as last week) about how much sense it would make for Facebook to get more into search to compete more directly with Google. Not just as a social network, but as a web company. It still makes sense, and perhaps even more so now that Google has made this new move with its privacy policy. What the policy has done has, for all intents and purposes, made Google one entity, rather than numerous products. One big fat rival to Facebook for users’ time spent online, user data and ultimately advertisers’ dollars spent trying to reach those users.
Why am I on about this? Because some weeks ago, Facebook told a bunch of advertisers and third parties (FM was one of them) that it was no longer OK to integrate Facebook actions into third party advertisements. This was always in their policies, but everyone was pretty much ignoring it – including most of the largest advertisers on the planet. After all, it’d be pretty hard to tell major television advertisers to stop asking viewers to “Like us on Facebook”. But for some reason, Facebook recently decided enough was enough online, and won’t let folks do exactly the same thing – with interactive functionality – online. You won’t be seeing ads on any site that integrate Facebook Likes, Shares, or other verbs, unless the advertisers paying for those ads have cut special deals with Facebook. (Or, of course, unless Facebook launches its own ad network…)
Makes you wonder about the potential of such a network. A Facebook version of AdSense. They certainly have the data, and Facebook is certainly all over the web. We’ve written on this before in the past .
Some have pointed out that Google’s strategy has kind of an Apple feel to it, in terms of having more control over what users do on its various products, and making sure that users have a “beautiful” experience, as Larry Page put it. This is quite interesting, considering the way Google has portrayed itself as almost the anti-Apple (particularly with Android) in terms of being more “open” – a philosophy that has been criticized a great deal by pundits.
But back to Facebook for a minute. There’s also the competition between these two companies at the talent level. Plenty of Googlers have jumped ship to Facebook. Others are finding other ways to go. We know SPYW isn’t sitting well with some former Googlers, and apparently it’s not with some current Googlers either, and according to a report from PandoDaily, Google CEO Larry Page has basically told those employees who have a problem with it to get out and not let the door hit them on the ass. According to one report, even Foursquare (who has in recent times expressed interest in working with Google) is poaching a fair amount of talent from the company.
Wrapping up
Google has taken some very interesting turns since Larry Page took over as CEO. Whether these turns are in the company’s (and users’) best interests in the long run remains to be seen. Either way, some of the choices Google has made have proven to be incredibly controversial both among users, and even with insiders. Many have expressed intentions of stopping their use of Google products. If too many decide to do this, it’s obviously going to be a problem. But how many Google users (and that’s users of any Google product) are really ready to stop using every single Google product? For some that’s going to be quite a change of lifestyle. There’s no question that those making complaints about Google’s businesses practices (as well as privacy watchdogs) are going to have a field day with this, whether Google is in the wrong or not.
If you work at Google, and you have a problem with Google’s “Search Plus Your World” features, you can find another place to work. Perhaps Facebook. That seems to be popular destination for former Googlers.
Google CEO Larry Page, according to a report from PandoDaily, told employees at a staff event:
“This is the path we’re headed down – a single unified, ‘beautiful’ product across everything. If you don’t get that, then you should probably work somewhere else.”
Apparently some of them are in fact looking to do just that. Sarah Lacy says she’s heard from several employees that they’re “embarrassed and unhappy”. She also points to this tweet from Chris Sacca, which says a lot:
@sacca Chris SaccaPast week, I’ve had three GOOG employees email me “seeking new opportunities”. Keep em coming. Believing in your work matters.1 day ago via Twitter for iPhone · powered by @socialditto
Earlier this month, Google launched “Search Plus Your World”. We’ll refer to it as “SPYW” to save time. The set of personalization features essentially equates to Google injecting a whole lot of Google+ into Google search results. This has been met with widespread criticism that continues two weeks later. According to a lot of the chatter going on, Google has lost the respect of a lot of users, and even some of its alumni.
Competitors like Twtitter and Facebook have been pretty vocal about the changes. Twitter publicly complained as soon as the features launched, claiming they’re bad for the Internet. Various Facebook staff complained about the features in status updates.
This week, we learned that one Facebook staffer took things a great deal further by creating a bookmarklet for web browsers that eliminate the features, and “Focus on the user,” as they put it.
One of the main things it does is add content from other places like Twitter , Facebook, YouTube, etc. to the “People and Places” section that appears for some queries. Google in its current state only shows Google+ pages and profiles here. This is why some find the whole thing anticompetitive, and even a sacrifice of relevancy, as Twitter profiles and Facebook pages will often be much more heavily followed and/or updated.
Marketing Implications
The +1 button already gave marketers incentive to use Google+. Google has been clear about the button having an impact on search ranking from the beginning. They’ve also been pushing authorship, which is tied to the Google Profile (the heart of a user’s Google+ presence). Google has indicated it would use this as a ranking signal. At the very least, it’s already adding to search visibility by simply adding a visual standout in search results (by showing the author’s photo). It’s also a link right back to the user’s profile, which promotes Google+.
Online marketing firm iProspect recently shared some commentary on SPYW after distributing a POV to its clients with insights into the changes. In the POV, the firm said:
These moves mark a continuation of the trends to include more social content and signals as part of both search results and the algorithms that determine them. By integrating both related Google+ profiles and the ability to follow them directly from SERPs for musicians, this may also mean the integration of Google+ business pages as well – for example, suggesting users follow the adidas brand page as a result of searching for adidas, or Motel 6 as a result of searching for Motels, making optimization, linking, following and keywords usage surrounding these profiles even more important.
Furthermore, the wider use of content from a user’s social sphere theoretically opens the door to other Google-related services and activities becoming part of search results. For example, highlighting YouTube channels that a user (or a user’s contacts) are subscribed to, have liked, rated highly, stores and restaurants reviewed by people in a user’s circles, or content from sites that are part of their friends’ reader list, makes participation and gaining a following in these spheres even more important.
Clearly marketers are respecting Google’s strategy. How can they not?
“Brands definitely need to at least be claiming their names in Google+, if not contributing at the same level that they might in other social networks to take advantage of the special preferences that Google+ is getting in results,” Herndon Hasty, Associate Director, SEO at iProspect told WebProNews. “Images shared on Google+ are getting a lot more real estate on the SERPs than they did before, and shared videos are called out in the new SERPs as well, so making sure to share these kinds of assets from Google+ can help put you at an advantage when it comes to continually attracting your followers’ attention.”
Another thing worth considering is that SPYW seems to be indexing content faster. We recently looked at a test from Google+ power user Paul Allen, who found that it took less than a minute for a Google+ post to show up in logged-in, personalized Google search results for Google+ users, and it took 20 minutes to show up for non-logged in users via Google’s main search results.
As Google+ is clearly having a bigger impact on search visibility, some are even questioning how big a factor on-page text even is for ranking in Google these days. Barry Schwartz points to some conversation on this topic in the WebmasterWorld forum. The hypothesis here is that Google is basically using on-page text to determine relevance, but hardly at all for ranking.
I’m not sure if I am buying this entirely, given the huge emphasis Google has been placing on deep, quality content over the past year with the Panda update. That said, social does appear to be taking a bigger role. The good news is that deep, quality content is likely to be shared.
Who is this content coming from?
As we’ve been saying for months, Google is placing a great deal more emphasis on who you are, when it comes to search. This is evident with the authorship strategy and Google+ integration as a whole. Now, however, Google has made the interesting choice of allowing Google+ users to use pseudonyms, something the company resisted greatly when Google+ first launched (though some slipped through the cracks).
Google wants its search results to represent quality. It’s the same mentality expressed when Google wanted real-looking photos of people in the authorship program (real as in, non-zombie, for example).
“One of the complications it’s complicated on is atmosphere,” said Google’s Vic Gundotra on why they didn’t allow pseudonyms from the get go. “If you’re a woman and you post a photo and Captain Crunch or Dog Fart comments on it, it changes the atmosphere of the product.”
Over the next week, we’ll be adding support for alternate names – be they nicknames, maiden names, or names in another script – alongside your common name. This name will show up on your Google+ profile and in the hovercards which appear over your name. In the next few weeks, we’ll be displaying it more broadly as part of your name in other areas of Google+ as well. So if you’re Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Jane Doe (Smith), or Saurabh Sharma (सौरभ शर्मा), you can now communicate your identity the way you want to.
To add an alternate name, go to your Google+ profile, click Edit Profile, select your name and click on “More options.”
I don’t see this having much of an effect on search rankings. If you go by the name “Dog Fart,” you’re still going to have to have enough clout on Google+ to send Google signals that you should be ranking for things. I don’t expect the Dog Farts of the Google Plusiverse to be ranking particularly well for medical advice. On the other hand, with SPYW, if you’re friends with Dog Fart, and he has posted about how to treat cancer, I suppose there’s a fair chance you’ll see that. We’ll have to keep our eyes peeled for such examples.
Criticism
Google is even taking criticism for the timing of the pseudonym roll-out. Trevor Gilbert at PandoDaily, for example, writes, “Search, Plus Your World wouldn’t have worked if pseudonyms remained disabled. Instead, people would search and find nothing relevant (certainly not the Twitter and Facebook pages they were looking for). At the same time, Google+ would have been – marginally – worse at launch if they had accepted pseudonyms from the get-go. So what did Google do? They played dumb for a few months to get users to use their legal names, and then when Google needed pseudonyms, they are suddenly open to the idea.”
“The entire thing is a joke, really,” he adds. “Google waited as long as it could without hurting itself, then changed positions entirely. In the end, Google is doing what is best for the user, so long as it is also best for Google.”
Google is really taking criticism from all angles these days, particularly since SPYW launched. That includes competitors and users. We never really saw Twitter speak out about the company the way it has in this case, and the whole bookmarket thing is really an extension of that, with Facebook and Myspace jumping in too (engineers from these companies contributed to the bookmarklet).
As mentioned earlier, some Facebook employees have criticized SPYW, and that includes at least one former Googler (the guy credited with coming up with the Circles concept implemented in Google+ no less). “Some of my ex-colleagues (who I still love) are going to shout at me, but well, I’ve just moved my default search engine to Bing.”
One has to wonder if there are people within Google still, who are offended by Google’s moves.
At any rate, the relevancy of Google’s search results is what is really at stake, and that’s what is going to make people either continue to use Google as a search engine or go “a click away” to Bing, Yahoo or somewhere else for their search needs.
Is Google shooting itself in the foot with SPYW or is Google’s version of personalized search a step in the right direction? Tell us what you think.
Facebook Director of Product Blake Ross has created a bookmarklet that people can add to their web browsers to take the “Search Plus Your World” out of their Google search results. Granted, Google has its own toggle to turn the feature on and off from the search results page, but this goes further.
First, here’s a video about it:
On FocusOnTheUser.org, where you can get the bookmarklet, it says, “This proof of concept was built by some engineers at Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, in consultation with several other social networking companies. We are open-sourcing the code so that anyone may use it or make it even better.”
John Battelle has a bit more of the story, however, after visiting Facebook’s offices. He talked to Ross, who is one of the creators of Firefox. Battelle writes, “It was a simple hack, he said, some code he had thrown together in response to the whole Google+ tempest.”
“After Blake showed me his work, we had a lively discussion about the implications of Facebook actually releasing such a tool,” writes Battelle. “I mean, it’s one thing for a lone hacktivist to do this, it’s quite another for a member of the Internet Big Five to publicly call Google out. Facebook would need to vet this with legal, with management (this clearly had to pass muster with Mark Zuckerberg), and, I was told, Facebook wanted to reach out to others – such as Twitter – and get their input as well.”
Apparently that strategy went through, since Twitter and MySpace are also getting some credit.
The bookmarket actually says “Don’t Be Evil,” a reference to Google’s proclaimed philosophy.
An interesting snippet from the FAQ page at FocusOnTheUser.org:
Q: I thought Google needed a deal and more info from social sites to integrate them into its new social features?
A: This is clearly not true. The bookmarklet never accesses any server or API outside of google.com. The information has already been indexed and ranked by Google.
