The integration of social search data is nothing new for Google, but with the release of Google’s new Search Plus Your World (SPYW and also known as Search+) search engine experts and journalists have been raising alarms over privacy and search relevance. Are there new factors for businesses to take into account now that Search+ has become the default search setting for Google?

By Guest Writer Lior Levin

What We Already Know about Google and Google Plus

Google+ has been an important part of helping content rank higher in a Google search long before the controversy over Search+. According to Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land, “Social Search results have, since October 2009, allowed content from people you know to rank higher, if you’re logged in.”

With the rising popularity of Google+, a presence on Google+ can help you rank higher in search results. If customers A and B are friends, but only customer B is following you on Google+, you could appear higher in customer A’s search results because of your common connection with customer B.

Sullivan adds in his article, “Google has previously said that gaining +1s can help improve your ranking for those who have directly +1ed your content, as well as for those they are connected to. In addition, it can show even those who aren’t connected or using +1 an overall count for your page, should it appear for them naturally.” This integration of social search elements hasn’t caused too much of a stir until Search+ added a new wrinkle.

Putting Google+ on Top of Search Results

The key development with Search+ is noted by Erin Everhart of 352 Media Group: “The catch is that it [Search+] only factors in your Google+ social graph, leaving Facebook and Twitter, arguably the more active social networks, out in the cold.” Though more users are ranking content socially through Facebook, Google+ activity, at least for now, seems to have a greater impact on rising in search rankings.

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The Invasion of the Search Result Snatcher: Google+

When preparing this week’s search and social news wrap-ups, we found an endless number of blog posts and articles about Google’s social network Google+.

Google Plus links appear in Google ads, as links on web sites, as invitation to coversations in Google search results, and — above all — as regular, “personalized” search results in Google search.

It is abundantly clear that Google is now willing to do anything to force both searchers and search engine marketing people to establish a presence on Google+. The goal is clearly to turn it into one of the major social sites on the web.

You might say that since Google owns the Google search engine, it must be allowed to do whatever it likes with the search results.

Maybe. What worries us, though, is that this does not make much sense business wise, either.

Here is why: Google’s success is founded on quality.

Google won over long forgotten search engines like AltaVista and Excite because they constantly focused on helping the searcher find what he or she was looking for. AltaVista, for instance, lost because it stopped working on the search algorithm, focusing on building a portal instead.

Now Google is sacrificing the quality of its search result by including links to inferior content on Google+. These links appear above much more relevant pages from Twitter and Facebook.

To me it does not matter if the relevant Google+ pages link to Twitter and Facebook. I do not want to be forced to take a detour via Google+ to get to the most relevant results. Nor do I want to be forced to establish and uphold a company page on Google+ just because Google controls the mighty Google search engine.

It is true that history never repeats itself, but there is something about human hubris that make people do the same mistakes over and over again. By sacrificing quality on the altar of market dominance, Google may — like AltaVista before it — soon find that the searchers go elsewhere.

Ironically, this time it is the old monopolist, Microsoft, who provides the most likely alternative: Bing. Search engines like Duck Duck Go and Blekko may also benefit from the strategic errors of Google.

Here are some of the search related articles we have found interesting lately, including some very interesting posts about Google+ and the quality of Google search results:

The Pandia Search Engine News Wrap-up

Dear Google: Crappy Results Like This Don’t Give The Impression You Care About Search
Danny Sullivan: The debate about what should — and shouldn’t — show in a Google search result for “santorum” has been well-documented, at this point. But I’d like to use this now famous search to illustrate something else: how it appears Google is taking its eye off the ball of being a search engine.

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Here’s this week news wrap-up with stories on social media and social networking.

Twitter Now Able To Censor Tweets, If Required By Law, On A Country-By-Country Basis
Danny Sullivan: So far, Twitter tells me that virtually all of the tweets it has had to pull have been due to complaints filed through the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Like Google, it has already been filing requests it receives to remove content with Chilling Effects.

Greplin: Search your Social Timeline
State of Search: “Personal search engine” Greplin is one of the social search engines which tries to grab a part of social search. It looks through your social accounts to find that one message or topic you lost or couldn’t remember who said it.

10 Things Facebook is doing that will guarantee its future dominance
memeburn: Despite the numerous stories one continues to read about people planning a mass exodus from Facebook, however, the global growth stats continue to boggle the mind month after month, with 1-billion Facebook users starting to look more likely sooner rather than later.

A woman’s world: How social media has changed gaming
memeburn: A recent study conducted by PopCap Games (most famous for Plants vs Zombies and Bejeweled) found that women were the most active gamers on social networking sites, making up over 55% of gamers.

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More stories from the world of search engine optimization and marketing.

Google Revamps Submit Content Page
SE Land: Google has updated their URL submission tool page and redesigned their Submit Your Content page.

7 Tips for Landing Page Greatness
SE Watch: Creating a great landing page is a critical step in the conversion funnel. By viewing the page as a speed bump in the conversion process rather than an information dump, you’ll find users will be inclined to move onto the next step, and they’ll do so because there is less friction.

Pew: 19 Percent Of Americans Now Own Tablets, eReaders
Marketing Land: After a big holiday season the percentage of people owning eReaders and tablets has nearly doubled — from about 10 percent in early December to 19 percent in January. The data were compiled from several telephone surveys the Pew Internet Project conducted between late November and January.

Tips on How to Help Uninteresting Pages Rank Better
SEOMOz This video was done by Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz. He has some fantastic tips on how you can help the boring pages of your site rank better.

Are You Keeping Secrets From The Search Engines?
Rick DeJarnette: So many websites invest in pretty web design with little-to-no thought on whether or not the search engine crawlers can access and interpret the meaning of that pretty content. This is really about down-level strategies, aka graceful degradation, for search.

New: Test Sitemaps & Features In Google Webmaster Tools
SE Roundtable: Two new features in Google Webmaster Tools: the ability to test sitemaps before submitting them to Google and testing crawlers specifically for Googlebot-Mobile.

See also this week’s search engine news wrap-up!

Google has revolutionized the Internet in many ways and shopping is just one of them. The easiest thing to do when you want to buy something is to search that product on Google. That will allow you to view reviews of the product, compare prices from different stores and make the best choice.

By Pandia Guest Writer James Lander

Google uses two strategies to help users save money:

1. Google AdWords – Google’s online advertising program.

2. Google search – The Google search engine.

Google AdWords

Google AdWords was conceived as a program that would allow companies to insert their own ads and keywords when promoting their products and have their ads displayed only when a user searches for one of the mentioned keywords. This would ensure that the ads actually reach an audience that is interested in the promoted product not just the people that reach a page by mistake.

This is considered a much better method than forced advertising, which relies on inserting an ad on as many sites, and pages as possible, hoping a user would eventually click on it.

Google ads may also appear on web sites who have signed up with Google’s AdSense program. Google will analyse the content of the relevant web pages and try and deliver ads that are relevant to that content.

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This week Google started rolling outGoogle Search Plus Your World, which — besides being the worst case of bad branding in a long time — will cause Google a lot of problems. Searchers will go elsewhere and governments will complain. Here is why.

The idea behind Google Search Plus Your World (let’s call it +World, shall we?) is good.

Personalized and social search

Google has presented personalized search results for a long time, using data from your Google GMail account (if you have one) and your web history. Google has been using these data to build you a kind of personality or interest profile, making it easier for them to deliver search results that are of interest to you personally.

If you are a computer geek, searches for “apple” are therefore more likely to bring up results on the computer company, rather than the fruit or the music company of the Beatles.

Google has also tried to enrich search results with real time data frome the social web. For at time it did, for instance, include twitter messages (tweets), which devlivered information about what is happening right now. This was definitely a good idea.

+World is an attempt to combine the two and add personalized social data to the search engine results. That should be a recipe for success. Instead we believe Google is facing a PR disaster. You see, the implementation of +World is bad, very bad.

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Here are the latest news from the world of search engines and Internet searching.

Google Fails To Trounce Bing (Again): The Fallacy Of The Superior Search Engine Revisited
SE Land: Time to revisit the question – is there really a big quality difference between Google and Bing? Over the past 12 months, many things in search have changed… The results are the same as last year – a statistical dead heat; meaning overwhelming parity between the engines.

IBM Assigns Over 200 Patents to Google
SE Watch: According to a blog post by Bill Slawski at SEO By the Sea that references US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) filings, IBM has agreed to give Google 188 granted patents and another 29 pending patent applications.

Headslinger
P Bradley: A new way to discover and read the day’s news This is another news curation system which pulls out major headlines for you from various different resources – think of it as a self selecting collection of RSS feeds and you won’t be that far wrong.

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Here are some of the posts and articles from the search engine marketing field we have found interesting lately.

Why Great Content Doesn’t Guarantee You Links
SEJ: When it comes to content creation the most important concept to grasp is the fact that it is an asset. Just like a rental property or some stocks and shares, your content has the potential to generate cold hard currency.

Consumers Still Don’t Know What to Do with QR Codes
Marketing Pilgrim: A new study from Chadwick Martin Bailey shows that people are scanning, but they don’t know what do with the results.

Should computers have their own websites?
New Scientist: Stephen Wolfram, creator of “computational knowledge engine” Wolfram Alpha, suggests that “.data” should join the likes of .com, .org and .net as a new top-level domain (TLD) for organisations to share data in a standard from, creating a “data web” that would run in parallel with the ordinary web.

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