With news in the tech World just picking up after the Christmas lull, Google has announced some fairly far reaching news which confirms what a lot of tech commentators have been speculating on over the last few months. Today Google announced on its blog “Search, plus Your World” which is a new set features aimed at social search and the user. Typically the average web user will get search results based on the many billions of pages, images, videos and other media Google now offer through its search engine, today Google is making changes that will offer the following:
Personal Results – these will allow the user to locate information, including Google+ posts, photos and media that the user owns or that has been shared with the user, this will be a private search result that only the user will be able to see.
Profiles in Search – This could be a controversial new offering if proper thought has not gone in to privacy aspect (let’s see what happens) – simply it will allow the user to search on Google for profiles of Google users (public profiles presumably) to find people close to you or who may be of interest.
People and Pages – This will allow users to find Google Profiles and Google+ Pages related to their interests or their specific search. This new feature will really help Google+ users looking to find people and pages of interest and should help the site gain further traction even further. I wonder whether we see a whole new game of Google+ Pages optimisation?
So what is Google doing? well as many have speculated, 2012 will be the year where Search and Social truly combine and these changes look to be another steroid injection in the Google+ arm which is now seriously gaining momentum. Google wants to make search “social” and by allowing users to find things that are personal to them and making it easier to share they are hoping that adding this sort of functionality to their search will help them stay ahead in the search business. If these are changes that are going to be rolling out across Googles platform then we can assume that they are now heavily committed to Google+ and social search.
There are still a lot of people out there that dismiss Google+ as a viable social network, but as an avid user myself I find it offers far more interaction than both Facebook and Twitter. The weapon that Google still has in its armoury is Android, with millions of mobile handsets around the World being run on Googles own mobile operating system I wonder how long it will before both Google+ and todays new search features are rolled out over-the-air to this massive user base and we suddenly find we are all connected even more closely.
2012 is shaping up to be a very exciting year in tech!
To read more about Googles announcement take a look at their blog post here.
