It’s fair to say that we all value content shared by people that we know, over just any Tim, Dick or Harry. This principle idea has been the catalyst for a number of innovations from Google over the past couple of years, with the aim of making search a more personalised experience for users.

When Google created their very own social network in the form of Google+ back in September 2011, they enabled people to create their ‘own little world’ on a Google platform; this has spawned their latest development in the ongoing search/social saga - ‘Google Search plus Your World’ - which launched a couple of weeks ago.

If (and it’s a big ‘if’, as we’ll talk about later) you are signed into a Google account and have a Google+ profile, you’ll be able to access the ‘personalised search’ feature. The crux of ‘Search plus Your World‘ is that it incorporates content from Google+ directly into your search results. Within the search results pages there are options to show personalised results; hide personalised results; and to just see personal results. It’s currently only available when searching on https://www.google.com/ in English but will undoubtedly be rolled out across the globe over the coming weeks and months.

The screengrab below shows a few of these features…

In full, the three elements to ‘Search plus Your World’ are:

1. Personal results

Content including posts and photos will be pulled from Google+ and included within the search results. For example, if you were searching for photos of somewhere you’d like to go on holiday, you may come across a photo that a friend (in one of your circles) took whilst they were on holiday there a couple of months ago and subsequently posted on Google+. You could then easily get in touch with your friend via Google+ to find out more about what they thought of it.

2. Profiles in search

If you start to type the name of someone in your Google+ circles, a number of predicted profiles will appear within the autocomplete box (although let’s hope you aren’t friends with a number of John Smiths). Once you’ve selected the person you were looking for, the results page will include their Google+ page (with recent activity), as well as other related web results such as twitter and LinkedIn profiles.

3. People & pages

When searching for a particular topic, you may see prominent people or pages from Google+ listed on the right-hand side. On Google’s official blog they have used the example of searching for the topic of [music], for which Britney Spears appears at the top - we’ll let you decide for yourselves if Google still need to do some tweaking here and there!

So, what impact will this have on search channels?

In order for users to see these new personalised search results they will need a Google account, a profile on Google+ and to be signed in when searching; this remains the major stumbling block, particularly as Google+ has a mere 60 million users compared with Facebook’s 800 million.

At present, the number of searches made by those logged in to a Google account is estimated to be between 10-15%; of that, only an estimated 20% of searches will be returning ‘Search plus Your World’ results.

In search, some markets will find it harder to attract clicks in a traditional manner from both paid and organic search as results are ‘polluted’ with Google’s own agenda, with social results effectively taking up positions in the search rankings that could otherwise have been showing ‘traditional’ results. So, brands will either have to embrace  Google+ by posting content and encouraging their website visitors to +1 them…or increase their activity (and therefore spend!) in paid advertising. Or, indeed, do both!

Is ‘Search plus Your World’ a good thing?

Along with many of our search industry peers, we’re not convinced that content from Google+ should be ranking higher than ’standard’ natural search results.  Should it be given prominence simply because it was posted on Google’s own social network?!

Given that Google already has a more than dominant share of the search market in the UK (which stands at 91.4% according to StatCounter), ‘Search plus Your World’ is adding fuel to the fire for those arguing that Google’s monopoly is bad for the Internet.

Twitter’s Alex Macgillivray declared that it was a “bad day for the Internet” and that search is “being warped” (by making it harder for people to find real-time information provided by Twitter) - with Google responding by saying that they were “surprised by Twitter’s comments” as “they chose not to renew their agreement with us” (a reference to the end of the deal which saw tweets included in Google Realtime Search results).

Time will tell

As with all new developments, time will tell as to whether this is going to be a game-changer or whether it’ll just die another slow death like other Google innovations (Buzz, Wave). But word is that Google employee bonuses are tied to the success of Google+ - so chances are that ‘Search plus Your World’ is here to stay and is a key part of the strategy to grow Google+. If it ever does compete seriously with Facebook in scale, then ‘Search plus Your World’ could well change the face of search.

We noticed a change today in the way Google results are being displayed for local searches. Instead of the typical format of the map being shown above natural results and pushing the organic listings down, Google seems to have changed it in favour of moving the map to the right hand side and pushing the paid listings down instead.

Google Local Search Results

The format choice is interesting as it seems to be implying that Google is putting the natural results in a more important position than the listings which advertisers are paying for. This is quite unusual for Google, who never usually lower the prominence of ads which make them revenue (only kidding – we love you Google)!

The change in design also seems to draw the eye to the natural results which have a Places page, with those listings being highlighted with the map symbol and user review stars. The contact details for that business is also pulled in from their Places page, meaning the user doesn’t even have to click through, they have your user rating, description and contact details right there on the results page.

So what does this mean for companies looking to appear for local searches? Well there are a few implications of this change in design:

1. Relying on paid search is no longer enough – you’ve been pushed down the page, so now the first Adwords listing is below the fold. Big impact, even in the top position.

2. You need a website – before this change, the map featured alongside it a list of Google Place pages, which meant even if you didn’t have a website you could still feature on the local listings by optimising your Google Place page and getting in the “7 pack”. Now, you might still be in the map, but you’re not in that crucial ‘top of page 1’ position in the general search listings.

3. You need a Google Places Page – if you have a website and are not on Google Places, despite being highly optimised and in a great position on page 1, you may be ignored in favour of a result further down that Google is highlighting.

I’m pretty sure paid advertisers will be kicking up quite a fuss as a result.

It does make you wonder whether Google has some more big plans for Places. The latest change is even more reason for advertisers to use Place pages, so maybe it’s paving the way for some kind of revenue generation on there as well?

Watch this space.

Yesterday, via live webcast, Google announced some changes to their search offering. In short, Google Instant was born, a system where the search results are loaded before you finish typing a word. It’s all centred around Google Suggest and the terms that the search giant predicts you are looking for.

While it launched in the US yesterday after the webcast, logged in users in the UK will be able to experience it within the next week.

If you want a play with Google Instant, visit Google.com. Here’s a quick video overview of it…

What does this mean for brands?

Brands need to realise that the big difference to the user in this incarnation of search is the fact that they may have gone into Google to search for a specific term, but Google Instant could massively influence the search term they end up using. A keyword distraction effect.

For Google this is all about the importance of speed - ie the time it takes the user to type a term, see the results and choose the listing they want. People are surprisingly adaptable when it comes to online and are keen to embrace anything which could make their life easier or more interesting. So whilst many are already saying they don’t like it, I’m not sure it’s going to cause a dent in Google’s massive monopoly of search!

So what does all this mean for search engine marketers?

In our opinion it’s going to mean a different type of keyword research for any search project. Previously, you may have looked at a range of keywords and decided on the ones for optimising (or bidding on, in PPC) based on volumes of searches, competition, cost and obviously relevance. Now, a key factor to take into account in addition to all of these is what search terms Google Suggest serves before you’ve even finished typing your search term.

Let’s look at an example from one of our clients’ industries: many of their potential visitors go to Google looking to find ‘pregnancy information’, a term which has a high volume of searches. Many pregnancy sites are optimising their sites for this term and competing for it. Now, the first ‘pregnancy{space}’ term Google Suggest pops up with is ‘pregnancy week by week’. This term is completely relevant to the user and they are likely to divert away from their original query and use the results that have already loaded.

The consequence for SEMs is the need to be looking at what ‘distraction terms’ Google Suggest is putting in front of the user and ensuring that their site is optimised for those terms as well.

The long-term effect this might have is, as yet, unknown. Google Instant is on by default, although the user can switch it off, so if it’s here to stay, users will have to get used to it.

Our guess, is that this means the way that people search is going to be more and more important. Previously, you could put your keywords into the search box in any order. This change may mean that as people become accustomed to using Google Instant, they will adjust their search habits and change the order of words to facilitate an easier search experience using Google Suggest and Google Instant. So SEMs need to be watching the trends in their keywords too as search terms rearrange themselves.

It’s going to be an interesting change to Google and one we’ll be following closely.

The launch of Bing, Microsoft’s new ‘decision engine’ (which is essentially a rebranded Live Search) was talked about as the search engine to rival Google. But it seems there’s more hype than substance. Much of what has been done is take a concept that already works, made little tweaks to ‘improve’ it and then shout about it from the rooftops.

Some features have been used by Microsoft as Bing’s USPs, but none of these appear to be new or foolproof:

Categorisation – Bing is able to categorise your results into web groups such as images, facts, quotes, etc and display these sections within your results and in the LHS menu. But there are only a few industries where this has been implemented and the category headings are easy to miss. These web groups are intended to help the user in their need to drill down but most people will search in more depth using their own words, especially when they find out that this clustering is really just another version of the related search suggestions which are also on the page.

Instant answers – apparently Bing is a mix of Google (search) and Wolfram Alpha (decision engine) in that it will serve you links but should also be able to answer your query on the page in some circumstances. Again, great in theory but sadly lacking in accuracy at the moment.

Prime Minister search on bing.com

Prime minister of England results are ok – the information up front followed by some useful links. But how up to date is the information? Let’s try a forumla 1 search…

Who won Forumla 1 on bing.com

This might be a true fact from 2007, but what about the 2008 winner? Or the F1 winner from this weekend?

Scrolling image search – if you’re looking for images on the web, Bing’s ability to carry on scrolling down the page seemed like a great idea. No more waiting for the page to reload as you go from page 1 to page 2 and onwards. However, users quite often find an image they like but carry on looking to see if they can find a better one. On Google you can go back to page 11 and retrieve your image, with Bing, the reduced scrollbar and lack of numbering means a user has no idea where to go back to in order to find that image.

Hovering page snippets – one feature which could do well is the hovering page snippets.

Hover-over page snippets on bing.com

Bing takes more content from the landing page and delivers it in a hover-over next to each result. This gives the site owner the potential to get more information into the results rather than just the meta description. However, the hover-over only appears when the user’s mouse gets near to the RHS of the listing, so it will be interesting to see how popular this is with searchers ie how many people actually find it and use it. It definitely highlights the importance of an inticing first paragraph on every page though.

There are more features such as the travel search within the results, search history (also available with Google), shopping search and the changing background image (not a hugely important USP), but I have serious doubts that any are big enough to cause a stampede of users away from Google.

Well…except maybe the heavily reported video autoplay feature on Bing. This is apparently proving very popular with people looking for sites they might not want to appear in their browser history…

Google has teamed up with major social networking sites to fight the Facebook juggernaut. They are working on an initiative to provide an open, standards-based approach to social networking … OpenSocial.

TechCrunch reports…

OpenSocial is a set of three common APIs, defined by Google with input from partners, that allow developers to access core functions and information at social networks:

• Profile Information (user data)
• Friends Information (social graph)
• Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)

Hosts agree to accept the API calls and return appropriate data. Google won’t try to provide universal API coverage for special use cases, instead focusing on the most common uses. Specialized functions/data can be accessed from the hosts directly via their own APIs.

Unlike Facebook, OpenSocial does not have its own markup language (Facebook requires use of FBML for security reasons, but it also makes code unusable outside of Facebook). Instead, developers use normal javascript and html (and can embed Flash elements). The benefit of the Google approach is that developers can use much of their existing front end code and simply tailor it slightly for OpenSocial, so creating applications is even easier than on Facebook.

We are about to build a couple of Facebook applications for a new client, so may well need to investigate OpenSocial as it becomes available. Watch this space.

If you’re a Facebook user, you’ll want to be aware that soon they will be opening up your profile to Google search. The BBC reports …

The default setting is that you will be made available to Google and the like, unless you opt out. Of course, this raises privacy concerns…and I’m sure will cause a number of Facebook users to question how much of their information is freely available.

If you want to opt-out of being publicly searchable, you’ll find a tick-box in the Search Privacy settings of your Facebook account - as shown below.