Partner Article

Latest Google Changes

This week Google unveiled its latest change, affecting both its flagship search engine and its social network, Google+.

‘Your World’ already applies to all those signed in using the English version of google.com, and one would imagine it won’t be too long before it’s rolled out globally on regional search engines like google.co.uk.

Your World essentially mashes together your Google+ life and the searches you conduct on its search engine, something the online giant has long been promising/threatening to do. Writing on the official Google blog (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/search-plus-your-world.html), Amit Singhal said: “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.”

These features are Personal Results, which bring photos and posts from the searcher’s Google+ network into the main search results and Profile’s in Search, which enables the searcher to more easily find people and businesses. Finally, People and Pages enables the searching of Google+ pages and profiles based on a particular topic.

What does Google’s ’Your World’ mean for businesses?

So what does this all mean for businesses with an online presence? Well for a start, it means more opportunities to be noticed for businesses that have a Google+ page. Say you sell rare vinyls, for example, and a user follows your brand page on Google+. At a later date, when they’re searching on Google for that limited edition David Bowie record, your pages are likely to feature prominently in the user’s ‘personal results’ (which can be viewed within the main search results or on their own, depending on the user clicking a simple toggle switch).

It also means that by have a Google+ brand page, you gain an extra opportunity to be noticed, as profiles are included for signed in users.

Taking a broader view, this is yet another step that signals Google’s commitment to making search social, and delivering a unique experience to users based on who they are as an individual. Businesses with an online presence (which in 2012 should really be all businesses) and online marketers should pay close attention to any future changes, as the ‘S’ in SEO is rapidly beginning to represent social as well as search.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Jon Celeste .