“We’re transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships.”

I am not quite sure where to take off with this post – I was initially going to write about the high volatility of the organic search space in Google and that for businesses that heavily rely on search marketing as a core marketing channel for their sales funnel, more focus should be placed on paid search marketing; but Google seems to have pressed the button for me with their recent “Search plus your world‘ announcement.

It all started when most of us began to notice the infiltration of two or three additional Google+ powered entries in the organic results of some searches on Google late last year. Even, Dr.Pete from SEOMoz attempted to decipher Google’s ever changing Search Result Pages (SERPs) in this post and still got us wondering what the set structure of Google’s search result pages are in this day and age.

There is no doubt at all that Google is aggressively taking it’s search results personalised in order to make Google+ a success – this is worryingly up to the level that it is going to start displaying privately shared Google+ posts in its search result pages. This is really interesting because, Facebook’s core value proposition to it 800 million ‘citizens’ is that it is can be as closed and as private as its users would like it to be – I mean, there are privacy settings on Facebook that disable your profile from come up on it’s search results even when your name has been searched for on Facebook. On the other side of the court, Google+ is forcing a more open social experience on its users. Take this statement from their blog for instance (their words – not mine):

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

Apparently, Google search is now becoming a people finder of sorts and also a match maker connecting searcher to communities…I much preferred when Google fetched for plain old publicly available web pages and not pages from its Google web properties; as is more and more the case these days. It’s not too obvious who is going to win this Social war but my guess is that the odds are heavily on Facebook’s side.

Have a look at how Google’s search results are to transform in 2012:

Creepy, searching for my name, not only auto-predicts it, but can reveal my full address (if I added it to my Google profile) – huge privacy issues:

Swap between personal and public results

These truly are dark times – the search marketplace truly needs a viable contender.

SSL and {not provided} – All Starting to Come Together Now

Remember the {not provided}, Google going SSL saga back in November that got the SEO community crying their bellies out?

Well Google is justifying that if it is going to reveal so much private conversation on it search result pages from your private Google+ network, then a way to justify the display of ‘private’ (yes private) information is by using SSL protocol to ‘protect’ your search…right. They went on further to explain that SSL is the same protocol used for gmail accounts. So searching for stuff online should not be likened to checking your email…wow. Good going…

When mainstream media rip Google+ and the new Google ‘Social’ Search in pieces, let see how many more users Google+ would attract.

Here are a couple of articles already:

• Could Google’s attempt to ‘Plus Your World’ be a monopoly move straight into the hands of anti-trust politicians? [Daily Mail]
• Twitter unhappy about Google’s social search changes [BBC]
• Google search changes set off uproar [USA Today]
• Google likely to face FTC complaint over ‘Search Plus Your World’ [LA Times]
• Twitter Slams Google: Social Search Changes Are ‘Bad for People’ [Mashable]
• Who Loses in the War Between Google and Twitter? Users [Business Week]
• Google’s disastrous decision to muck up its search results with stuff from your social network. [Slate]
• Twitter: Google search changes are ‘bad for the internet’ [Metro]
• Google search tweak spooks privacy advocates, rivals [CBS]

Any reputation management specialist would sense the heavily skewed negative sentiments flowing around the web about Google at the moment, largely thanks to the outlash from Twitter’s lead lawyer, Alex Macgillivray and strangely no comments so far from Facebook.

Google – sort out you s**t – you are polluting your SERPs, not improving them!

Note to SEOs

Google is a technology company – arguably the most innovative tech company in history. What keeps Google’s innovation going is change and this change inevitably always has an effect on its organic search results (this includes local listings, maps, shopping results, etc). It’s in Google’s interest to make the AdWords space a more stable environment for advertisers as it is its core revenue generator (like advertising is to newspapers).

SEOptimise’s Marcus Taylor suggests in this blog post that the direction of SEO/Google Search Plus in 2012 might be geared towards Google attempting to create a ‘social’ map similar to Facebook’s Open Graph that connects searchers with content providers (i.e. through rel=”author” & rel=”publisher” tags) in a bid to establish niche communities/eco-systems in which authorities would emerge.

Another interesting perspective about the Google Search Plus development is that of Jon Henshaw from the Raven blog; Jon draws on two new developments – first is the prominence of the new Google Bar on the top area of the browsers of millions of gmail/google account holders, which he likens to be Google’s key magnet to its freshly designed eco-system (with G+ at the core of course); the second development is Google’s new reincarnation of PageRank; G+’s Google Profile Authority (GPA), which would be more focused on quality rather than quantity and would be a core Google ranking factor, going forward.

Inevitably, the name of the SEO game is adaptation to Google’s continuously changing persona – with some core fundamentals remaining same i.e. like creating *great* content & promoting the content. For instance I don’t think a site like: dpreview.com would ever do badly on the SERPs for photography related search terms, no matter how many times Google changes because it has *great* sharable photography content. It would in fact be detrimental to the results of Google to exclude such as site as they more than justify the positions on Google’s result pages.

The long and short of it all is that: as an SEO you would always need to adapt and evolve your skillset with Google’s new rules (kind of like a surfer taming the waves).

Google Search ‘Plus’ Your Private Messages is a post from: Fuzz One Media

Did you think the launch of Google’s Universal search back in 2007 was revolutionary?

Well it looks like the introduction of Universal search formed baby steps to Google’s new search feature called Search options.

Google’s search options adds an extra layer of dynamic filters to the search engine result page (SERPs) – with a single click a search result has extra filters (on the left) that shows your search query results as Video, Forum posts or Review only results. You can also further filter your results by time or choose to display more text on the description area of the SERPs.

I think the most impressive features are the Wonder Wheel, which is a visual SERP that suggests similarly search queries visually, and the Time Line option that displays search results by time with a graph that shows search volume over time.

Here is an example:

• You search for ‘Nikon D90 review’ on Google
• Filter the search to display the mention of ‘Nikon D90 review’ from only forums
• Then further add a filter to display SERPs in the last 24 hours
• Finally arrange the results to display the by time using the Sort by date option

You will get this search result i.e. Nikon D90 reviews on forums only in the last 24 hours with the newest forum post display first.

Google want us to see its new search options feature as:

a tool belt that gives you new ways to interact with Google Search, and we plan to fill it with more innovative and useful features in the future.

It really makes things interesting.

Google Search Has Changed Forever with Google Search Options is a post from: Fuzz One Media