Hot on the heels of the Bing toolbar with Facebook function comes Google’s announcement that they have updated Google Social Search to add an extra dimension to search results for their users. Google state that in their opinion; “relevance isn’t just about pages, it’s also about relationships”; which is why they believe that social media and networking should have an influence on how important and useful they deem a result to be in relation to the search.
It certainly helps Google that they have something of a market share when it comes to socially interactive sites such as YouTube, and instant sign-in to Flickr with a Google account already in place (although the photo sharing site currently resides in Yahoo’s stable). If Google’s reported interest in negotiating a Twitter takeover come to fruition, this will become even more evident, although not owning the micro-blogging giant (yet) doesn’t stop Google’s new update from utilising behaviour on Twitter to help shape SERPs.
Whilst Google Social Search has been in action since 2009, this latest update will include a greater level of integration for social results mixed in with the others. You may well start to see some of the results containing annotations showing the online activity of some of the people you interact with, as in the below image from Google’s blog about this update when a search for ‘climbing Kilimanjaro’ shows a Matt Cutts blog post on the subject with image . Things that your friends and social contacts do may well be bumped up the results if you search for related topics.
Of course, the influence this has on any single user’s search results is heavily weighted by whether your social media accounts are linked, either publically or now privately (which will please those who have a separate secret Twitter account dedicated only to Justin Bieber as well as those conspiracy theorists who may not want all of their online guises to be publically available) to your Google account. Google may prompt you to connect various accounts which they think belong to you on a search results page, as well as in account settings.
From these changes, it is clear to us at Andy Stats that search is becoming ever more personalised. Some might look at it from the point of view that search engines like Google are making decisions for us based on who we know -which can be seen positively or negatively depending on your stance on such things. If Google shows results that relate to your online connections in a higher position on the page than others that don’t directly relate, then are they assuming that you are interested in only what these contacts do and think rather than making an informed choice yourself? Is it giving the user more useful and relevant results, or encouraging users to just do what their friends do and ignore results further down which may have something new and perhaps different to contribute? I suppose it depends on the reasons why you search for something in the first place.
Is this another step on the road to Google domination of the entire online experience? Users can opt-out of seeing results like these by not signing into a Google account or not linking social media accounts to it, so the decisions are down to the searcher themselves at the end of the day. I’m looking forward to giving it a try and see whether I think it improves my time spent searching online, or actually makes me look harder for what I want to really find as I have to wade through what my contacts are doing online first.
This blog was written over 6 months ago and Internet Marketing and is an always changing industry which means the information within this blog may be out of date. Use caution when using any methods or suggestions within it.
