This week Google launched +1, a kind of Facebook “Like” button that lets you give kudos to a site or web page you like.

Over the coming weeks, Google will add +1 buttons to search results and ads on Google.com (the English language US version of the site). If you cannot see it in your search results, you can sign up for this feature over at Google Experimental).

When you search, a +1 button will pop up next to a search results or an ad. Click on it and you have recommended that listing to the rest of the world.

The question is, of course, how “the rest of the world” is going to find out about it?

Google gives the following example:

“The next time Brian’s friend Mary is signed in and searching on Google and your page appears, she might see a personalized annotation letting her know that Brian +1’d it. So Brian’s +1 helps Mary decide that your site is worth checking out.”

Serious lack of transparency

On Facebook, your friends are people who have invited you to connect with them or vice versa. Every single friend connection is approved by you. But Google is not Facebook. Who are the friends we are talking about here?

The fact is that Google makes it extremely difficult to find out who these friends are, and the blog posts presenting +1 do not make you any wiser on this accord.

This lack of transparency reminds us of the impenetrable chaos of rules and regulations regarding privacy on Facebook. It is as if these companies are trying to keep the effect of you sharing from you, maybe in order to make you share as much as possible.

Part of Google Social Search

+1 is part of Google Social Search, Google’s attempt at including information from social networks into search results. They have already started adding notes to links people have shared on twitter and related sites.

The network of “friends” we are talking about here is based on the selection of people you have identified using your Google Profile or your Google Account Settings (Gmail account).

No, these are not people you have added as friends deliberately, although the friends you are chatting with using Google chat are part of the list.

Google uses the information found in your Google Profile and Google Account to determine what networks you are member of. This applies to

• Direct connections from your Google chat buddies and contacts
• Direct connections from links through Google Profiles or Connected accounts

But that is not all. Google also adds friends of your friends: “Secondary connections that are publicly associated with your direct connections”. The only way to remove them is to remove the connecting friend(s).

Google will not include your Facbook contacts in Google Social. It would love to, but Facebook won’t give them access.

But here is the problem: Even if you manage to find out who your Google Social friends are, they are not necessarily the same as the Google +1 friends at the moment.

Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land, who has good contacts in Google, says that the +1 networks will consist of

• People in your Gmail & Google Talk chat list
• People in your “My Contacts” group in Google Contacts
• People you follow in Google Reader or Google Buzz

“What’s missing are people you are connected to via non-Google services, such as Twitter, Flickr or Quora. That’s something that will come in the future, Google says.”

In other words: If you take a look at the contacts you have (but most likely did not know you had) in Google Social, what you see is the list of +1 contacts as it will be in the future, after Google has been able to test +1 in real time.

We have been following the search engine scene since the mid 1990′s and it took us hours to make sense of it all. And the amazing thing is that Google launched +1 on the same day as it apologized for messing up the Google Buzz launch privacy wise. Then it goes on to launch +1, without making it clear to anyone who your “friends” are.

Non-friend “friends”

If you are using Gmail, as we are, all the people you have been in touch with appear as “friends”, as do all your contacts. Only a small percentage of these are what we can call close friends, and we do not even know their contacts personally (who may even be their enemies, for all we know).

This means that if I click on a +1 button, I am broadcasting the fact that I am recommending that site to a large number of people I do not know. My name and picture will pop up in their search results if they are logged into their Google account. What will this recommendation mean to them if they do not know me or know how — if at all — they are connected to me?

I am sure this will make sense to some Google users, but we find the concept hard to grasp. The problem is basically that it is close to impossible to understand the basic purpose of the Google Social network is. Google may have plans for using +1 as the basis for a new kind of social network, but won’t tell us what kind of network that will be. This makes it hard to understand what you are signing up to.

Our suggestion is this: If you use +1, treat it as if every recommendation you make is public. Be very careful before you OK any use of your network information until you understand what it is going to be used for.

What is the point for the user?

It is unclear what’s in it for the Google user.

If the point is for you to have a way of labelling sites you like, so that you can come back to them, this might help you. Your +1’s are stored in a new tab on your Google profile. You can show your +1’s tab to the world, or keep it private.

Still, you would probably be better off using a bookmarking service for organizing a list of favorite web sites.

+1 would also make sense if you wanted to recommend a page, a site or a video to a well defined circle of friends, like on your wall on Facebook. But you cannot do that. These recommendations only appear in the search results of your many friends and “non-friend friends” (or, maybe later, in ads and text boxes on non-Google sites).

The question is therefore why you should click on the +1 button instead of posting the link to Facebook or Twitter. It is easier to click on a +1 link, for sure, but the social feedback from that click is going to be zero, as opposed to a tweet, which may bring you comments and a lot of “virtual hugs.”

What would make +1 useful, would be to connect the button to twitter and/or Facebook, for instance by forwarding the web page title and a goo.gl shorten link to Twitter for tweeting. But that is unlikely, as neither Facebook nor Twitter is owned by Google.

Search engine algorithm

So why is Google doing this?

It may be part of a wider strategy, a kind of step by step approach to luring you into using Google as a social network. So far, however, there is not much that makes sense in this respect. Google Buzz has been a fiasco, delivering only a fraction of the traffic of twitter.

The answer might be found in the fact that Google will start using +1 in its search engine algorithm, making the number of +1 recommendations part of the formula that determines search engine rankings.

Google is struggling to keep its search engine results relevant and spam-free. The latest dramatic updates to its algorithm proves that much. It may be hoping that +1 will provide additional information on the quality of sites, in effect making you a member of their team of human editors.

This is actually a step back to the 1990′s Yahoo model of using human editors to check the quality of submitted sites, and a step that breaks with the Google philosophy of delivering neutral and objective machine based results only.

Google may believe that since they can track your networks of friends and contact, they can use your interconnectivity to determine whether you are a real web surfer or a spammer trying to fix the search results to your benefit.

A new kind of spam

That won’t stop black hat search engine marketers from trying to create artificial networks of fake friends in order to boost the rankings of their sites, however. I guess we may be seeing the start of a new Indian growth industry: “the Google +1 friendship promoter”. You can hire 1000 Indian college students and make them imitate the activities in a real social web of friend connections.

Ads and sites

The +1 button may also appear next to Google ads. Google says:

“We expect that personalized annotations will help users know when your ads and organic search results are relevant to them, increasing the chances that they’ll end up on your site. You don’t have to make adjustments to your advertising strategy based on +1 buttons, and the way we calculate Quality Score [Google's way of calculating the ranking of ads] isn’t changing (though +1′s will be one of many signals we use to calculate organic search ranking). Think of +1 buttons as an enhancement that can help already successful search campaigns perform even better.”

Google will also let sites add a +1 button to their sites in the future, so that visitors can show their appreciation by voting for it +1 wise. You can sign up for information about this feature, but it is not ready for prime time yet.

Google has, however, already set up an enabling service where you can allow Google to use “your +1′s and other profile information to personalize your content and ads on non-Google websites”.

This means that Google — in the future — will use +1 information to target ads to your taste, or add ads and sites recommended by your “friends”.

Google says:

“Enabling +1 on non-Google sites does not share your information or your friends’ information with the site you’re viewing (unless you specifically consented to share your information with that site). Instead, Google acts as an intermediary between you and outside websites–displaying your information to you without sharing it with the site.”

If you disable +1 on non-Google sites, the +1′s of your social connections won’t appear on websites outside of Google:

“For example, if your friend +1′s an article on a news website and you view that same article, you’ll only see an aggregated, anonymous count of people who’ve also +1′d the site.”

There is clearly a business model underpinning this feature. Being able to tailor ads and content to the personal taste of the visitors make ads much more effective. But again: It is unclear what is in it for the Google user.

Our conclusion:

It might perfectly well be that Google will eventually include +1 into a more coherent service that adds value to the Google users’ experience. At the moment it seems that it is much more beneficial to Google and its advertisers, and it is impossible to find any narrative that makes us understand what this is all about.

The confusion regarding who your friends and contacts are are even worse than the confusion following Facebook’s various levels of privacy and undermines our trust. Google will have to fix this, if this is to work.

Google Webmaster Central Blog: Introducing the +1 button
Google Blog: +1’s: the right recommendations right when you want them—in your search results

Go to this page to find out who your Google friends and “non-friend friends” are (requires a Google account)