Around a week ago, Google unveiled the next stage of their personal search integration: ‘Search Plus Your World’.
Basically, before I go into details concerning the feather ruffling said announcement has made, let’s take a quick look at what this new initiative involves.
- Google + Photos & Posts in Search
Now, when you’re signed into your Google + profile Google will begin to push Google plus photos and posts from your friends directly into your search results. Personally, I can’t think of anything more annoying; if I wanted to search Google + I would go on Google + but there you have it, it’s done.
- Profiles in Search
Following the update, Google now also pushes Google + profiles into search results. On their blog, they state that they’ll only suggest ‘people you’re close to or might be interested in following’. You might find this useful if you’re logged into a business account as an SEO or marketer, but do you want networking suggestions when you’re simply doing some online shopping? Again, it’s unclear why this has been integrated into web search and not left in the ‘Suggestions’ area of Google + where most people will happily go to find it.
- Pages
Finally, Google is also integrating Google + pages into the normal web search results. The idea is that if you’re searching on a topic you might be interested in joining groups and pages related to that topic. While this might be the case, again there’s an argument for keeping such things separate. If I wanted to join a social media group on knitting I’d search Facebook or Google + directly for knitting groups.
And this is the major problem that I forsee with these changes. The reason many of us use Google web search is because we want to find just that: web pages. Most modern day internet users are savvy enough to know where to go to find social media groups or profiles and simply want old fashioned web pages returned for their regular searches.
Arguably, it was Google’s fresh and simple design which contributed to its early successes, not over complication. With the introduction of these Google + features into search, I fear we’re one step closer to over population in the search. We already have rampant adds, shopping and image results, reviews, +1 histories and much more crammed into one page and I wonder if Google is moving toward creating a restaurant menu which simply has far too many dishes on it to choose from.
Google have shown time and again that they’re committed to returning the most useful and relevant results for users, which is an admirable goal. But arguably, by cramming the SERPs with data from all kinds of streams (images, social media posts, news, product items etc) Google is making the SERPs less relevant, as at least 90% of the results returned will be the wrong stream for which the searcher is looking. For example, if I’m looking for new shoes, neither images of shows, a site about shoes, or a group about shows is going to interest me.
So this brings me to my final point. The Search Plus Your World announcement has sparked even more calls for Google to be investigated for its conduct regarding competitors. You’ll notice that I didn’t mention that the search giant was integrating Facebook or Twitter profiles into its search results did I? That’s because they’re not, and this is the major problem. Many argue that Google are unfairly favouring Google + with this update and are therefore abusing their market dominance.
Time will tell, but in the meantime, whether you’re a fan of the changes or not, it’s worth noting that, as an SEO consultant, the success or failure of these changes is important. If they succeed in making Google search more popular, then more people are going to be signing up for Google + profiles, and more than this, more people are going to be searching whilst signed into their profiles. This means that the keyword data that many SEO companies rely upon will continue to decline, as the ‘not set’ section of Google analytics grows.
If this new personalised search is less successful and is perceived as annoying by users, we might expect to see more data on keyword traffic to our sites, as people sign out in order to have more of a simple and traditional search experience.