Google Search, plus Your World

Google is moving more and more into the social search space, apparently to Twitter's chagrin. The company announced yesterday a new search paradigm called Search, Plus Your World, which aims to include A LOT more of your social interactions into your search results.

Google wrote at its blog:
"We’re transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships. We began this transformation with Social Search, and today we’re taking another big step in this direction by introducing three new features:
- Personal Results, which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts—both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page;
- Profiles in Search, both in autocomplete and results, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following; and,
- People and Pages, which help you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks. Because behind most every query is a community. Together, these features combine to create Search plus Your World."
But the new Google Search won't include your Facebook and Twitter feed friends info. Search guru Danny Sullivan wrote:
"Search Plus Your World doesn’t cover content on Facebook. Or Twitter. Or Flickr. Or any social network or place where content might be shared to a more limited audience. Currently, “Search Plus Your World” would be better described as “Search Plus Google+”

And that's pissed some off of the other social companies. WSJ Blog wrote:
"At issue is how Google rolled out a new social search that completely ignored other social services such as Twitter and Facebook. The search giant defended its actions saying that it did not have access to crawl content on other sites, including Twitter."

I do like what Google is doing around searches for communities. If you're a leading voice in a certain community, it's likely that your search rankings will rise for your, erm, 'thought leadership'. Google writes:
Starting today, if you search for a topic like [music] or [baseball], you might see prominent people who frequently discuss this topic on Google+ appearing on the right-hand side of the results page. You can connect with them on Google+, strike up meaningful conversations and discover entire communities in a way that simply wasn’t possible before.

It's an exciting time for the Web, connecting people and places rather than links and websites. Watch Google's entertaining video on its search 'transformation':