Google Search is factoring personal context in with the results it offers. Not only will “Search plus Your World” look through Google+ to determine what’s important to each individual searcher, it also will include those photos, videos and more when it returns its answering links.
There are three levels of this new functionality: Personal Results, which finds your and your Google+ circle connections’ photos and posts; Profiles in Search, which in autocomplete and search finds profiles of people you know or who it thinks you might like to know; and People and Pages, which zeroes in on people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest.
“We’re transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships,” Amit Singhal, Google Fellow, posted on the company’s official blog.
He gives several examples of how this will transform the search experience. One is that when searching for someone you know who has a common name, the search results will return the specific person you had in mind. Another is when researching a vacation destination, the search results will give priority your friends’ photos and posts about that place.
To reassure people that these developments are in no way creepy or intrusive, Singhal emphasized the highly visible and customizable privacy controls from Google+ are now part of Google Search as well.
Related links:
Google’s Inside Search Blog – Search Plus Your World
John Battelle’s Search Blog – Search, Plus Your World, As Long As It’s Our World
ArsTechnica – Google “Plus-ifies” search with social features in effort to un-plus Facebook
CNN – Google search undergoes ‘most radical transformation ever’
Mashable – Google Merges Search and Google+ Into Social Media Juggernaut
Marketwatch – Google ties social service closer to search
Business Insider – Google+ Is Way Bigger Than We Thought
Photo by Flickr user Bytemarks/Burt Lum, posted under Creative Commons license
