Google +1: Making Search More Socially Relevant
Google has taken the next big leap in their social transformation of search engine results pages (SERPs). This time they’re calling it Google +1. We mentioned back in December how the Web’s top search engines, Google and Bing, seemed to be focused on making SERPs more actionable and a kind of ‘social hub’ for users, in an attempt to encourage users to spend some of their social networking hours on search engines–in addition to sites like Twitter and Facebook. Now Google’s launching a social recommendation tool of their own, Google +1, which allows users to give both organic search results and paid search ads a virtual thumbs-up, directly from the search results page.
So as to “get you the most relevant results as quickly as possible,” as Google states in their +1 announcement, users will start to see +1s next to search results and ads that their Google contacts (e.g. Buzz, Reader, Chat) and eventually their Twitter connections have +1′d. By making these +1 recommendations public, Google’s also collecting aggregate data for pages within their index, so that in the event that none of a user’s connections have +1′d a set of search results, users may still see a +1 count for the number of users who have +1′d a link across the Web. This gives users access to a sort of macrocosm of a social network in place of unavailable recommendations from their personal networks. With +1, Google is operating more like a social network than ever before.
Google As The Social Search Network
For years, Google has worked tirelessly to figure out social media and how to compete with networks like Twitter and Facebook. Twitter integration and the continual battle to get access to Facebook’s Like data isn’t necessarily a sustainable one. And, Google realizes this. Google’s concluded that they need to combine the best of both worlds–social and search–to compete with social networks, as well as to come up with their own social recommendation tool: Google +1. Facebook and Twitter are great at providing these social connections and their recommendations, but Google’s attempting to be the better, more relevant social network by creating a personalized, social search engine by combining your social networks with your search activities.
Google’s using their access to the Twitter firehouse to build a socially relevant algorithm that helps determine which +1 recommendations to show users. Take the scenario where you’re on Twitter or Facebook and come across a recommendation from a friend that’s either something you were already thinking about or something you didn’t realize you were interested in, but are now interested in because of that friend’s recommendation. Google wants to repeatedly give you that feeling of discovery from a trusted source (what Google calls ‘contextual discovery’), and they’re attempting to do just that with +1. With Google +1, the search giant is clearly stating that this is what’s missing from social media sites and the demand gap from users that they can fill.
+1: Google’s Work Around to Facebook Likes
Many people are calling +1 Google’s version of the Facebook Like button. Google certainly seems to be taking a page from Facebook’s playbook, both with the use of social context within ads and the plan to roll out the +1 button to publishers–both tactics leveraged by Facebook in their own social ads and with the viral sweep of the Like button across the Web. While Bing has continually released new social search features integrating Facebook’s Like data as part of their ongoing partnership, we’ve watched as one upgrade after another emerged for Google’s Social Search, but always with the missing ingredient: Facebook Likes. With +1, Google appears to be banking on this as their work around to the Facebook Like network.
Google Continues to Leverage Users for Quality
Facing issues like spam, content farms and paid links, Google has started turning to a more human-based approach to evaluating the quality of search results. For example, their new “hide sites” feature allows users to restrict specific domains from their search results. Google +1 is an extension of the use of people for quality, allowing users to cast their ‘vote’ for sites they like. In this shift toward user opinion, it’s not yet clear what the SEO impact of a +1 will be compared to the traditional signal of link authority. Will a +1′d result be perceived as just a temporary vote, or something more long lasting like a page with numerous inbound links?
Introducing the New ‘Social Vote’
Following suit with other social sharing options like Facebook’s ‘Like’ and Twitter’s Tweet button, Google’s introducing a new kind of social voting for users. Just as Google has started using social signals from Twitter and Facebook as search relevancy indicators, +1′d results will also be factored into their ranking algorithm. In addition to what’s happening on the back-end, with Google +1, users are able to clearly see why they’re seeing certain results and which of their social connections are making those results surface. For search results where someone from your social circle has +1′d it at some point, you’ll see an annotation alongside the result showing that user’s name and picture. This has been a common theme among Google’s recent Social Search updates, as we just saw this with Google’s integration of Twitter, Quora, Flickr, etc across SERPs.
What’s Next for Google +1?
While Google +1 is still in its infancy and is only being rolled out to a small number of users to start, the next steps that Google has both confirmed and other features people are speculating will arrive in the following months could have major implications for marketers. Some are questioning the user adoption rate for +1, as there are many barriers working against the new feature, such as the requirement of having a Google Account and the public nature of +1. We’re going to be monitoring and tracking how Google +1 impacts rank, so stay tuned for updates from the Optify Team.
