Social Search Integration - Three Changes at Google

[tedster]

Looks like Google is moving on Social Search integration into the SERPs. An official blog post today describes three new changes in how social results are made available through the regular SERPs when you are logged in:

First, social search results will now be mixed throughout your results based on their relevance (in the past they only appeared at the bottom)

Second, we've made Social Search more comprehensive by adding notes for links people have shared on Twitter and other sites.

Third, we've added a new option to connect accounts privately in your Google Account. (After all, you may not want everyone to know you're @spongebobsuperfan on Twitter.)

In addition, if our algorithms find a public account that might be yours (for example, because the usernames are the same), we may invite you to connect your accounts right on the search results page and in your Google Account settings.

[googleblog.blogspot.com...]

[Simsi]

Perhaps it's only me but I don't think I've ever found a "social" post useful when searching for something :-/

[tedster]

This gives me a few more reasons to be sure my browser isn't logged in before I do a search.

My friends and online social connections come from all different directions. Google would have to figure out whose opinion I value in each vertical before this comes even close to being useful for me.

[edited by: tedster at 8:21 pm (utc) on Feb 17, 2011]

[Simsi]

LOL. I know where you are coming from. I always check I'm logged out before I search on G too :-)

[tedster]

Yeah - but my sister thinks social recommendations in personalized search are a great idea. Most of her social tribe have been friends since junior high school. She'll be all over this expansion.

[engine]

Social Search: I guess they had to do it. I can hear the sound of the social search marketers chattering about black and white hat techniques already.

Seems like another good reason not to be logged in, but others might see it differently.

[nomis5]

Being a bit of an ignoramus, I'm not sure what this means! If I facebook a site (or twitter or whatever else) or someone posts a site on the same to me does that mean the site will appear higher if I do a google on that subject? Or what?

[tedster]

If you do a search on something and someone in your social network has recommended that thing or tweeted it, etc, then for you (and you alone) that online recommendation may show up somewhere in your search results - as long as you're signed in to your Google account.

[Alcoholico]

Perhaps it's only me but I don't think I've ever found a "social" post useful when searching for something :-/

You're not alone.

[frontpage]

Perhaps it's only me but I don't think I've ever found a "social" post useful when searching for something :-/

I have found it very useful numerous times.

For example during breaking news, often people post updates from local media, personal photos, and accounts live.

Main stream media usually reports many hours if not days later and also gets their photos from eyewitnesses via social media as well.

Example:

Breaking news: Are you on the scene?
Send us your video, photos or personal report, and we'll feature a selection of them on msnbc.com.

Notice the "Twitter" "Facebook" links.

[msnbc.msn.com...]

It can also be useful for things like movie reviews, product reviews, and topical events.

[indyank]

as long as you're signed in to your Google account.

Will this be effective only when we log into google account or even via logged out persononalized search?

[indyank]

I did find the answer to my question.I need to clear the web history - [google.com...]

[viggen]

Seems like another good reason not to be logged in, but others might see it differently.

...i think this is not about "us", its about the masses... ;)

In my opinion this is now a treshold moment for those companies that dont have any social noise in their mix. The bigger your "fanbase, follower", the bigger the noise, and if it means it is pushing down your competitor a notch or two in the serps (even only temporarily), all the better for those that have that...

[indyank]

Does this work for connections on FB? or it is only for Twitter and linkedin?

[tedster]

It's for any connections that you enable in your Google Profile [google.com]. Looks quite different than it did when I first set mine up. I'd say Google Buzz is evolving - and this integration of social results in the SERPs is another step.

Thanks for the info about local news, frontpage. You may turn me into a convert with observations like that.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

But relevance isn’t just about pages—it’s also about relationships.

Get a bigger social network and appeal to fresh sets of eyes regularly.

I wonder how this will impact publisher earnings since bad things happen when the same people visit the same ads over and over.

[edited by: Sgt_Kickaxe at 6:57 am (utc) on Feb 18, 2011]

[indyank]

Get a bigger social network and take care to appeal to fresh sets of eyes regularly.

Have strong passwords for your social networking profiles.Indyank predicts a massive increase in attacks on them in year 2011, due to this new google social search economy... :lol:

[r4bet]

i have no friend :'(
[trolls are anywhere]

[idolw]

fotunately, google's profiles are so badly designed only their internally trained PhDs are able to understand them. that means hopefully nothing will show up for me even if I am logged in.

[martinibuster]

TechCrunk published a good article and interview [techcrunch.com] with Mike Cassidy, Google's Product Management Director of Search about Social Search Integration.

This part is interesting because it reflects on the evolution of citations, the heart of Google's algorithm. When first conceived, citations were done with links. However the web has changed and so have the way citations are made. Instead of links from blogs and other personal or business sites, people are sharing links from social sites like twitter, Yelp, Flickr, etc. The nature of citations have changed.

"There’s a lot more sharing than creating going on on the web," Cassidy says. In fact, he said that something like 100 million times a day people are sharing links that Google sees...

That is an interesting wrinkle on the concept of CITATIONS, which is the heart of PageRank, counting how many citations (links) a page of content receives to determine it's importance. Since people share more than they create web pages, Google apparently is counting these shares as citations, although in a different way. Citations are the heart of the algorithm and I don't think enough attention is paid to citations outside of traditional links.

Here's more from that article on the topic of non-traditional citations:

So is Google using social signals to alter the actual results? Yes and no. In some cases they are, in some cases they’re not, Cassidy says. He declined to get into specifics, noting that it was a part of their special sauce. But he did say that there are several things that the algorithm now takes into account from a social perspective on top of all the other more traditional signals.

[indyank]

martinibuster, Thanks for sharing it.So it does look like google might not have much insight into FB "Likes".But FB is the place, where real offline friends get connected more than on twiter.FB lets you to huddle into your own social circle more than twitter!

Twitter is a free for all.People follow others whom they had never met before (or will never meet anytime) and share what they share...It is a place where People make 140 character announcements and if they get followed by too many people like for example Matt Cutts, it gets retweeted by all and sundry...not just your social circle...

So, both have positives and negatives and it is unfortunate that google would not be able to do much with FB at this stage...

One thing for sure is Google is now working hard to promote the brands "Twitter", "Facebook", etc. indirectly!

And for the first time google will depend on third party services, on a somewhat major scale, as inputs to their ranking engines! Until now, they could crawl links on the web without any help, but now they would depend more on Twitter and to some extent on FB and others for this social search... (Yes, they could still crawl these citations, but Twitter, Facebook etc. have more control on what googlebots can do on their sites)

With this announcement, I guess, the valuation of twitter would have jumped many time higher...

[PayMePerClick]

Real beneficial social media integration would be if Google integrates with FB and LinkedIn in a way where you can only show your Google search ads to people in certain demographics or job titles based on the link between FB and LinkedIn. This would be a search marketer's dream, especially in the B2B space.

Really don't care about joe schmos take on local news, or knowing my friends like a product. I'd prefer to make unbiased opinions of products and news then talk to my friends. in person. REAL. LIFE.

[zeus]

mixing social c. results with google search is just not good, I search google to get to other site, if I need anythin social i go there.

[almighty monkey]

Whelp. Time to buy that automated twitter bot.

Actually, I think this is something that will only effect certain verticals. It's similar to the effect Places had - some of my clients were completely unaffected, others got a free pass to the first page, further clients I had to pretty much start from scratch with.

If a topic is popular enough on the social networks to justify its inclusion in the SERPS, and your not involved in that conversation, um, you kinda deserve to lose out. It's not like Google reading social networks has come out of nowhere.

What I'm interested in is how Social effects regular SERPS. What is a tweet worth compared to a FB like? What other factors does it monitor? What are they doing to prevent abuse?

That is an interesting wrinkle on the concept of CITATIONS, which is the heart of PageRank, counting how many citations (links) a page of content receives to determine it's importance. Since people share more than they create web pages, Google apparently is counting these shares as citations, although in a different way. Citations are the heart of the algorithm and I don't think enough attention is paid to citations outside of traditional links.

I suspect your dead on here mate.

Thing is, from the earliest newsgroups through to Twitter, social networks have been pretty easily and widely abused ever since the Internet moved out from academic and military institutions and into peoples homes. If it is a ranking factor, whats to stop me creating a 'Tweet farm', similar to a link farm, that tweets and retweets each others content, spins it as it goes, and drops links back to my site? Why can't I just create 30,000 facebook accounts, mix and match their relationships, and have them 'like' my site?

If I'm thinking this, you can be sure some black hatter has already coded the software to automate it.

[mromero]

Is this connected to webmaster world now being peppered with tweet / like buttons now?

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I hope they treat product based keywords differently, the onslaught of spam in the name of trying to sell products is going to get even more social.

[tedster]

whats to stop me creating a 'Tweet farm', similar to a link farm, that tweets and retweets each others content, spins it as it goes, and drops links back to my site?

That's been going on for a while. Algorithms are evolving to defend against it at the social sites themselves - and at Google too, I'm sure. Services like Klout are doing some amazing things in this direction. See [klout.com...] for recent changes they've made in measuring real influencers.

I've been involved recently in a lot of analysis of the complete Twitter data stream, and we are seeing that many bot patterns are not hard to detect. The biggest thing is that bots do not actually have any true influence - their "networks" do not overlap and bleed into other networks in a natural way because few real people actually follow them. There are other signals that can also be identified simply from natural language processing on the text of the tweets.

In the past two days on Twitter there was a kind of bot war we were watching closely. The network was growing its size and following real accounts at a rapid rate. At the same time, Twitter's algos were identifying the growing bot network within hours and de-activating those account. Seeing them bite the dust so fast was both amusing and hopeful for the future.

And if Twitter has evolved this level of analysis, I'm sure Google has, too.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I agree with Tedster. In some cases your tweets aren't included in the public timeline until you've got a bit of history as a valid user. Google is probably weighting different accounts for various factors too.

You've got to remember that this change has no impact in search rankings, it only impacts your personal serps when logged in to google and that's based on your personal network.

Since that's the case the best you can hope for is to create a large network that suits your goals. If clicking on affiliate offers is your goal you'll want a network full of frequent buyers for example, not an easy task, especially when it's possible that repeat or product search terms are not included in this change (they would be the most highly spammed and least likely to be real tweets).

[Nuttakorn]

Google identify relevant on social connection. It is based on a combination of the following:
- Direct connections from your Google chat buddies and contacts
- Direct connections from links that appear on your Google profile
- Secondary connections that are publicly associated with your direct connection

[frontpage]

Is this connected to webmaster world now being peppered with tweet / like buttons now?

Adapt or die. The owners know a trend when they see it and using social networking to expand your user base is a great concept.