Search Advisory

Google recently announced a new feature called Search plus Your World, a significant change to the Google Search experience. The new feature, now available to all Google users searching in English, integrates personalized results into Web search results using Google+.

Over the last several months, we’ve seen Google make minor changes in an effort to create a social search experience, but nothing quite this drastic. In Google’s announcement yesterday, they explained that Search plus Your World is effort to try to understand people and relationships, and provide people with the content they care about. But how can a search engine do that?

According to Google, Search plus Your World includes three new features, which help incorporate “your world” into your search results:
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.

Despite Google’s efforts to make this sound like an exciting improvement to the search engine, it has already started raising concerns.

We now know that the recent implementation of encrypted search was in preparation for Search plus Your World. But is increased internet security going to make people feel safe enough to share personal information via Google+, knowing that it will show up in others’ search results? It seems as though this could make users more apprehensive to share on Google+.

Another big concern is that Google will now be prioritizing its own content instead of linking to the most relevant content on the web – What does this mean for companies and their SEO efforts? And what does this mean for other social media sites? There has already been some backlash since the announcement, and I suspect we’ll hear much more in the coming days.