The integration of Google+ into Google’s global search on the week starting 10th January finally shows that Google’s strategy has been what I predicted all along. Let’s for a moment forget the less well informed hysterics which have broken over “Google’s ruining of search” or the rants about “Google pulling the ownership of search trick” and focus on the functionality.
Anyone familiar with the Google Panda update knows that the social signal is a strong cue in search, something which Google officially confirmed at the LeWeb conference in Paris, last year. Google’s focus, when it comes to search, is in delivering the best possible results in terms of relevancy and freshness. This has been an uncompromising approach the company has never shied away from, even when it, at times, hurt its own properties. Its concern has been that should Twitter (with a 200 million Tweets a day volume) and Facebook (with 10% of the planet in its members base) wall off their content, Google will be hamstrung, its search engine suddenly rendered half-blind.
Worse, than that, a weakness in search imposed by others will help Google’s rival, BING, whose close partnership with Facebook allowed it to make inroads in both social search and semantic indexing, before Google even got started.
In terms of evolution in the online ecosystem that would aspire to survival not of the fittest but the most well-connected, something which to Google, whose search algorithm is so advanced, must be unfair and seem intolerable. Before G+ was anything more than a notion, Google repeatedly reached out to Facebook for closer cooperation and greater transparency only to be rebuffed and last summer, just as G+ came out Twitter refused to renew its search deal with Google where the latter indexed the data of the former. Fast-forward a few months and as Google integrates G+ plus into search Twitter comes out as the most voluble, allegedly wronged party in the affair.
Search technology is hard to understand and even harder to gauge as far as impact is concerned. As a result Google’s move has caused an online uproar as many who feel that it is a show of strength decry it as an unnecessary show of force which will hurt the quality of search.
Myth-busting time
Myth #1 – Google’s integration of G+ results into Google search violates the Google+ individual privacy agreement. The integration of G+ into Google search results has only opened the public data of G+ to search and linked it up to a personalisation of the profile which is entirely in keeping with trends Google has been developing for some time now.
Myth #2 . Google’s integration of G+ results into Google search now makes search deliver results only from Google’s own social network favouring it unfairly. Although this would appear, at present, to monopolise personalised search results with G+ data this is not the case. At present G+ data is the only meaningful social signal Google can index in its entirety and the personalised search is already nuanced by search results from global search, a move Google started back in 2009 (as a direct response to BING receiving social signals from within Facebook in its own search results).
Myth #3. Google owns search and is now using its ownership to directly promote and profit from its own properties. Global search is unaffected. Carry out a search without being logged into a Google account or go from personalised the global search and you get different results based upon that. Google’s search algorithm is working exactly as it should.
So What is Really Happening?
In a knife fight you only need to pay attention to whoever is not shouting and making sudden moves. They are the ones who usually carry a weapon and have the intent to use it. Amidst the noise of (mainly) journalists objecting to a change in search they do not clearly understand because, understandably enough, the picture of Google suddenly turning evil and behaving like a bully makes for a juicy headline and much reader interaction, the only other people protesting are Twitter (who suddenly seem to get what not being included in search really means) and the FCC, whose understanding of how search works probably matches that of congress on the implications of SOPA.
So who is keeping quiet? Facebook, which by all accounts stands to lose even the relatively meagre traffic it gets from Google search with the indexing of its public posts. Facebook is keeping quiet because a close analysis of Google’s social search may suddenly indicate that it would be in the public interest for most data on the web which does not violate the personal protection of data act, to be made transparent to every search engine
Such a move would crack open Facebook’s walled garden to Google search (amongst others) and render Twitter’s attempts to shakedown Google for the right to use its data, impotent. If either of these two things happen Google will have won the game in a single move. Its search engine is by far the most competent at indexing data and its sudden enrichment from the Facebook and Twitter’s hordes of it will give it a massive boost in the social search stakes and help it achieve degrees of personalisation in the search results which, until now, we can only dream of. Of course there is the chance that things will go south. The FCC might not quite see things Google’s way in which case there probably will be an unnecessary (in my opinion) tweak in Google search to deliver fewer results from G+ in the personalized search mode.
In either case, as Annie Infinite has already pointed out, you’d better make sure that your social media marketing strategy includes a Google Plus account at its core.
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