So while you were busy wondering what to do about the Facebook Timeline, Google decided to introduce Google “Search plus Your World.”
Google’s Inside Search Page explains what you get with the new search:
Search has always brought you information from across the web. Now, search gets better by including photos, posts, and more from you and your friends. When signed in with Google+, you’ll find personal results and profiles of people you know or follow. You can even expand your world by discovering people related to your search.
In other words, this is search with “a little help from your friends.”
Google includes an extraordinary little video to show you how your personal results will change:
And they explain – several times – that these results are personal and private: “No one else will see your private content in their results unless you’ve shared it with them.” In “Google Merges Search and Google+ Into Social Media Juggernaut,” Lance Ulanoff of Mashable calls this “a significant blurring of the line between the web as we know it and the web as you and your Circles of friends know it.” But he also points out that Google has been careful to annotate personal posts with a silhouetted figure, so that users can tell the difference between “authoritative results” and posts you or your friends have created.
But the Associated Press report – which was picked up by ABC News, the Washington Post, and Newsday, among other media outlets, introduces some caveats:
Facebook and Twitter pose a threat to Google because they don’t allow Google’s search engine to log the avalanche of photos, links and observations tumbling through those services. That’s troublesome to Google because its search engine could become less useful if its system can’t analyze what people are signaling is important to them so those preferences can be factoring into the results.
In fact, AP says, Google is “tackling that challenge” with the new “Search, Plus Your World.” AP points out that Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, was already mining personal data including Facebook information since May. Yet Google’s enormous user base gives it a tremendous advantage:
Google’s emphasis on more personal results figures to attract more attention because its search engine is so dominant. It handles about two-thirds of the Internet search requests made in the U.S. while Bing processes less than one-third, including the activity that it comes through a partnership with Yahoo Inc.
While Google hopes that you will find this inclusion of personal search results – including photos from your friends, content from your Google+ circles, Profiles in search, and related people and pages, an attractive and useful addition to search, AP points out that “the changes could also spook some people as they realize how much information is being compiled about them.” And Ulanoff concludes his piece by wondering: “Is it time for Facebook to finally launch that fabled Facebook Search Engine?”
Oh, and by the way, if, like me, you’re not seeing personal results when you go to search on either Google or Google+ , Google says: “Don’t worry. We’re rolling the feature out over the next few days.”
