In the last few months, Google’s search results have experienced their most radical change ever. Back in January of 2012, the company’s so-called “Search Plus Your World” format started to be put into action. This format locates both content that has been shared with you in a private manner and also matches from the world wide web that are public. All of these search results are going to be combined into a single bunch of listings.
A quick note of warning, though: This format is only available for those Internet users who are actively searching the Internet in English and those who are signed in to Google.com. People who will utilize this format or otherwise run into it cannot miss it due to the company making sure that people will get an alert message that tells them they are utilizing the new format.
It can be reasonably argued that this new format has been making life easier for certain Google users because it lets them find private content that is only shared among friends (like the private content you would experience on social networking sites) and also material from all around the Internet. This can be a timesaver of sorts since people can now find both types of information all in one, single, easy search.
With this new format, users will witness a new “Personal Results” window that has the habit of personalizing the listings you receive based on personal web-browsing conduct and social contacts and connections. Further, content that has been shared with individuals by way of the Google+ social network also shows up now. To quickly cover what this means for people, let us briefly take a look at all of the personalized results that can and will show up under this new format.
This new window will aggregate results from the internet as you have become accustomed to from Google. Additionally, the results will contain posts, pictures and other content that has been personalized from a number of sources. The two main places where this personalization is derived from are your browsing and search habits combined with your Google+ content like public , limited, and private Google+ posts, pictures and other content along with your Picasa pictures too.
There is one more thing to note: Other popular social networking sites like Flickr, Twitter, or Facebook are not included in these results. So as a result, this new functionality could really be expressed as Search Plus Google+. Some users may not appreciate that their personal information from these sites is not available in this new service. Unfortunately these sites have terms of service that prohibit Google from crawling their information according to Amit Singhal who is the overseer of Google’s ranking system.
Ian MacOlive is a managing member of Syzygy SEO Consultants, a SEO Consultancy located in Edenvale, South Africa. For additional info on our SEO Services please visit our website.