What is Google Search, Plus Your World?
Google has been preparing us for this moment, yet somehow it still feels like a surprise. The search giant added an extra dose of social to search today when they announced Search, Plus Your World. Designed to deliver personalized results depending on the information your friends have shared and recommended, Search, Plus Your World delivers query results that are unique only to you.
Users can toggle between regular and personalized results in the upper right corner of their results page and then see how particular pieces of content are directly related to them. Privacy notations mark results with their status as Private, Limited, and Public while other features allow users to add people to Google+ directly from the search results page.
What Appears in Google, Search Plus Results
Here’s a quick rundown of the content that will appear in Google’s personalized search results (ordered from most private to more generalized):
- Private and semi-private Google+ posts, photos, Picasa photos, and other content you’ve shared
- Public Google+ posts, photos, Picassa photos, and everything else shared on Google+ and available for all of the web to see.
- Web listings recommended by your social connections
- Web listings pulled toward the top as a result of your personal behavior online
- Regular web listings
What Doesn’t Appear in Google, Search Plus Results
Right now Google’s personalized search should really be called Google Search Plus Google+ because that is the extent of social results available in Personalized search. Google is not opposed to adding other services like Facebook and Twitter, but any kind of partnership is yet to be determined. Here’s what Shinghal told Search Engine Journal:
“Facebook and Twitter and other services, basically, their terms of service don’t allow us to crawl them deeply and store things. Google+ is the only [network] that provides such a persistent service. Of course, going forward, if others were willing to change, we’d look at designing things to see how it would work.”
Google Search Plus Availability
Google is gradually rolling out Search, Plus Your World across the United States so if you can’t see the feature yet it should be available shortly. For more details about the release, watch the video below and view the announcement on The Official Google Blog.