Google Search With Personalised Results, Google , People and Pages

[engine]

Google Search With Personalised Results, Google+, People and Pages [insidesearch.blogspot.com]

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


1.Personal Results, which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts—both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page;
2.Profiles in Search, both in autocomplete and results, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following; and,
3.People and Pages, which help you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks. Because behind most every query is a community.

Search plus Your World will become available over the next few days to people who are signed in and searching on [google.com...] in English.

[tigger]

is it still a problem that sites run slow by adding G+ - I've not really taken much notice of G+ but its clear I may HAVE to now

[mhansen]

Isn't this the same kind of crap that caused Google Engineers (April 2010) and thousands of tech leaders to close their Facebook accounts last year? Opt-out inclusion of personalized data in the stream?

I REALLY hope that Google gets the same actions Facebook did by the same people.

[eu.techcrunch.com...]

[serpsup]

Isn't this the same kind of crap that caused Google Engineers (April 2010)

While I think Google may get some backlash for merging personal results with regular results, I don't think this is in the same vein as what Facebook was doing. Facebook was sharing private data w/ 3rd party advertisers and companies which violates privacy. Google is in theory just showing a user their own private data and private data they have access to via their social connections.

I think Google Search Plus the World is Google's equivalent of New Coke. It is all based on a major assumption that ppl actually want personal data in their search results. I have NEVER seen a relevant / useful personal result from Google with their existing integration. However, I am admittedly not a huge social user.

This is a huge gamble on Google's part... there is a very real chance that nobody wants their social results mixed with their search results... at the very least not all of the time, maybe as an "expand this search to include social results" I could see that being slightly useful.

I also think it is funny to hear how Google employees like Matt Cutts mentioned he did a search for werewolf and how great it was for showing him a picture of himself from a friend. When you are living / drinking the Google koolaid and all of your friends / co-workers are using Google Plus than just maybe you will find this integration to be a good idea.

Only time will tell but I think this is a huge overreach on Google's part.

[Donna]

Do you know that is the 1st thing I do before a search in Google? I check if I am logged out, guess how many people are like me ? I hate forceful companies and google is starting to win the contest for it .

[ecmedia]

I know people who love Facebook are logged into Facebook all the time. I would imagine that people who love Google Plus will do the same and when they search on Google they would see these results. As geeky as I am, I know the vast majority of the world does not see Facebook and Google as evil or cares what they do with their private information. I simply plan to be aware of this and factor into my strategy rather than try or hope for people to change.

[nomis5]

Is this live now? In the US, in the UK?

Have enough people taken up Google + to make the whole proposition important? So far as I know, the whole Google + thing is a complete non-event. Seems I am wrong, or maybe it's just the UK who have ignored it.

[fom2001uk]

Ironically, I think it'll take a Facebook campaign to bring this to the attention of the general public and force a backlash. If ever there was a time for a new search player, it is NOW.

[netmeg]

Showed up in all my searches today (logged in or not) and I don't care for it, but I'm not gonna waste time complaining about the inevitable, I'm gonna figure out how to make it work for me.

[johnhh]

So is Google a search engine or a social network ? once a company moves away from it's core business or changes it it often is a mess (New Coke is a good example, as posted above, as was Coke trying to selling water in the UK )
Judging by our newsletter sign-ups google has a very small minority of accounts here in the UK on our demographics, so a non-event as @nomis5 says above.

More likely they don't like Facebook taking the advertising dollars, and as it's unlikely they will buy Facebook, this their reaction. Unless they get those untaxed UK profits back into the USA without paying tax, under discussion with IRS I understand.

[Whitey]

Who knows how this will transpire, but Google is search, not social. People don't need to hang together over a search result - that's not what daily conversation is about.

These forays into foreign territories never seem to sustain , even though they cause panic and are necessary to Google to commercially test themselves.

So i agree with the above comments about core, and side with Netmeg about getting on with life whilst being aware.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Unprecedented security, transparency and control

Yeah, right, Google themselves stomp all over that notion.

[Lapizuli]

My problem with this change is that it is remarkably short-sighted of Google. The Internet is expanding our horizons and we are becoming a world economy as never before. When online language translators get good, people who are "other" will become our virtual neighbors. We're on the crux of a huge change.

Search has from its beginnings been a way to discover this new world and tread through these changes. Transforming search to a kind of cattle herding where the cattle only get to see the familiar places they know and love seems an attempt to stop our adapting on a societal level to this expanding world and to give us the same relativistic regionalism we've always known...which will leave its users floundering in a rapidly changing society under the auspices of an algorithmic authority that cannot adapt anywhere nearly as organically as people themselves....

I can see various reasons why they're doing it - profit, trying to make the web honest, and other good-old-fashioned cowboy motives - but where is the vision here? Looking backward, it seems to me...

[IanKelley]

an algorithmic authority that cannot adapt anywhere nearly as organically as people themselves

By incorporating social signals into search Google is attempting to add more of the human factor. They're doing the same thing they've been doing since the beginning with link popularity, augmenting the algos with metrics that represent what people think about websites.

It's not looking backward, in search when you look back what you see are search engines that died because they lacked the capability to take the searcher and the web as a whole into consideration.

[Reno]

I came to the conclusion some time ago that Google has a clearly defined longterm game plan and they are rolling it out one step at a time. I think it's fair to assume that the plan is closely held by perhaps a handful of people at the top, with those same people directing various teams of engineers to work on specific pieces of the puzzle that fit together as they are ready to go public. I doubt that Matt Cutts or any of the other spokespeople that we hear from are in this leadership group. Every now & then a tidbit is thrown out but it's like those blind guys feeling the elephant ~ none of them (or us) can see the full picture.

The one thing we can say for sure: Google will do what is best for Google. That's what public corporations do. They're not working for the good of the internet, or for the good of the webmaster community, or any one country ~ it's strictly an optimizing profit POV.

So nothing they do should surprise any of us. This evolution will continue on schedule and on target unless something really dramatic takes place, such as government intervention or a sudden loss of earnings. Google 2012 is significantly different from Google 2002, and I have a feeling that in 3 or 4 years, we will barely recognize this company. The only thing I'm sure about is the long-held Google tragedy that helped most of us earn an income is dead & gone, and it ain't coming back.

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[aristotle]

I agree that this is a bad move, but doubt that it will have much effect on the traffic that most websites get from Google. I've never even seen a Google Plus page and would bet that most other surfers haven't seen one either. I would also bet that a majority of Google Plus members are people who want to use it as a promotional tool or webmasters who naively believe that it will be a big benefit for their site.

[rlange]

zeus wrote:
When I search I dont want Personalized search I want to see stuff I dont know or new also, so that will not be a hit here for sure and its also a little creepy, like the book/movie 1984.

Personalization has it's use. One example I've seen given recently is a search for [cookie]. If you're a technically-oriented person, you're probably looking for information about browser cookes. Anyone else, however, may be looking for the edible kind of cookie.

joeventura wrote:
Here at the Big G we are going to add stuff to your results that you already know! That's helpful huh?

One of the best arguments against this "feature" is that, if you're asking Google, you've probably already determined that "your world" doesn't know the answer.

On the other hand, I can see the value in ranking highly a link that your friend posted to Google+, if it's relevent to your search. There's a not unreasonable assumption that if your friends post links on a topic, and you're looking for information on that topic, those links would be something you'd want to check out before others. Again, though, that sort of assumes that you don't bother asking your friends first about that topic...

gyppo wrote:
One wonders if Panda has had been put on hold to get this out the door....

You're making two assumptions here: 1) that there's only one team within Google working on everything search-related and 2) that tweaking Panda is such a time-consuming activity that any such team must focus their full efforts on it or put it aside when something new comes down the pipe. I'm pretty sure that neither of those are true.

--
Ryan

[londrum]

its a little bit like bookmarks. google are trying to mate their search engine with something like del.icious -- all it does is remember where you and your mates have been (ie bookmarked) and shows you that.

my problem with it is that you and your mates kind of get locked into a circle of links that might not be the best.

if i search for "widgets" and there's a hundred pages, i might only visit the first few.
presumably, those first few will then get a boost above the others, because i showed a 'preference' for them. they will then get boosted in my friends SERPs as well, and we all end up with these 3 links sitting at the top forever.
but who's to say they are the best?

just because i popped into the chip shop down the road a few times, it doesnt mean i want to eat there forever.

what happens when new pages are created? the rest of the population may have discovered those and loved them, but me and my mates are still locked into our personal SERPs, where these amazing new sites are buried below our "bookmarks".

[sundaridevi]

what happens when new pages are created? the rest of the population may have discovered those and loved them, but me and my mates are still locked into our personal SERPs, where these amazing new sites are buried below our "bookmarks".

The theory says that some people are more social than others. These heavily social people have lots of friends and from them the word spreads. Every market has these kinds of most influential people in any market.

Google's new search gives you a once or twice in a decade opportunity to get your message to them really cheaply.

[StoutFiles]

I agree that this is a bad move, but doubt that it will have much effect on the traffic that most websites get from Google.

You don't get it. I don't think any of you do. Google has been trying to manipulate search rankings to showcase the sites they want to showcase. They introduce "updates" like Panda to squeeze out the unwanted, and they pad the top of the search results with ads that look like results. They now even localize search results.

Now you're talking about search results that won't be different for each local area, but each individual user! Don't be shocked when Google decides that John Doe likes big businesses and other businesses set up with AdWord accounts. EVERY update has been bad for small webmasters, this one will be no different.

[Play_Bach]

> You don't get it. I don't think any of you do.

That's pretty bold, even a little rude. Your Google squeezing out the little guy theory has already been shared ad nauseum, thanks.

[rlange]

londrum wrote:
they will then get boosted in my friends SERPs as well, and we all end up with these 3 links sitting at the top forever.
but who's to say they are the best?

Alright, it's becoming fairly obvious that a number of people in this thread don't actually understand what this new feature is all about. I think even I was wrong in my previous post when mentioning links your Google+ plus friends post.

This feature will not boost rankings for pages that your Google+ friends visited. This feature will not boost rankings for pages that your friends post links to on Google+. This feature will include Google+ posts you've made and pictures you've posted, or posts and pictures that your friends have directly shared with you, in your search results.

This is essentially a stripped down, web-based, Google+-focused variation of their defunct Google Desktop [en.wikipedia.org] search application.

Now that I think about, it surprises me that they haven't already done something similar with Gmail.

--
Ryan

[Reno]

This is an argument getting a lot of attention in the tech sector:

Google, Google+ and search: Maybe it's all an SEO play

The flap over Google's playing up Google+ in its search results continues. Now Harvard professor and security expert Ben Edelman has weighed in on the debate. His argument: By embedding Google+ into search, Google is essentially prodding people to join its social network out of SEO fear...

Read the... Full Article [news.cnet.com]

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[tangor]

Might have made a new thread, but this actually applies to this...

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), as expected, has now written to the US Federal Trade Commission requesting that the watchdog investigates Google's search business.

The move follows Mountain View's decision to merge personal data collected via its social network Google+ with the company's search engine, which so far has received a cool response from industry observers.

Indeed, the carefully constructed Chocolate Factory is starting to resemble a sweaty indoor confectionery market peddling cheap sweets to the masses.

“Google’s business practices raise concerns related to both competition and the implementation of the Commission’s consent order,” EPIC said, in reference to a recent privacy settlement Google reached with the FTC.

[theregister.co.uk...]

[tangor]

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) may be expanding its antitrust investigations to include the increasing integration of Google+ into Mountain View‘s search engine business.

Additional probes into the links between Google and its fledgling social network are being ordered to assess to what - if any - level Mountain View is favoring its own services in the search engine market, two sources told Bloomberg. The FTC declined to comment on the matter.

[theregister.co.uk...]

[Donna]

They still wont "get it " till they get ruined .

[seodudez]

haha - people are switching to bing - [gizmodo.com...]

[azn romeo 4u]

Hitler is mad about this change

[youtube.com...]

And I agree with Hitler O_O This change sucks. WTF is google doing? Damnit, I don't want to sign up for google+ I don't understand why google doesn't include Britney Spears or Katy Perry's facebook pages anymore either. Or any other famous celebs.

They are trying to kill facebook off this way. Very slowly.

[Reno]

Hitler is mad about this change

If a fellow is sitting by himself in front of the computer, laughing to the point of tears while watching that video, does that mean he's a geek?

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[tangor]

Nah, a realist, perhaps!

[Reno]

The negative press just keeps on coming....

With Google+ favoritism, Google has decided to sell its soul — and it may pay

Google’s introduction of Google+ links into its search results is a big departure from the company’s previous more neutral approach to search, and it exposes the company to a huge risk.

It opens up the company to significant criticism from not just insiders but regular folks too, if they come to realize that Google is now favoring itself in search results, and therefore is no longer as useful...

(Emphasis mine)

Read the... Full Story [venturebeat.com]

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