Google, Your World!

We’re less than two weeks into the New Year and Google have already announced the first major movement of 2012 in the great social media war – social searches. Building from 2009’s Social Search and attempting to pick up the slack left by the death of Google’s Realtime service, it isn’t quite the game-changer we were expecting but could prove crucial as part of their grander strategy.

‘Search, plus Your World’, as it’s been dubbed, will offer Google users the option to switch from regular internet-wide searches to personalised results based on their online presence. Unfortunately though, with results currently only being sourced from Google+ and Picasa (Google’s image sharing platform), the service at launch seems deeply flawed and likely to fall under that most telling of Google cop-out’s, the Beta tag.

A Service “Bad For People”?

The fact remains that the Realtime service which Search, plus Your World attempts to replace gained its popularity due to the data Google were sourcing from Twitter. Without Twitter, and indeed Facebook, involved it seems unlikely that this latest social gamble will pay off, and to further complicate things Twitter have already voiced concern over this development.

Referring to the service as “bad for people”, Twitter’s outburst seems an attempt at kick-starting the debate on whether SpYW affords Google an unfair competitive edge.

“We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users.”

What they’ve not touched on, though, is the reason Twitter data isn’t included in these results, this being down to Twitter’s choice not to renew its data sharing deal with Google which expired last summer. In this light, the developments seem more of a technological tit-for-tat than the thought-out strategy we were hoping it to be.

Will the Wait be Worth It?

But what does this mean for both the lay-user and online marketers? With Google+ still failing to hit the mark with all-but the tech savvy, it’s unlikely the majority of those who turn to Google for search needs will find any worth in its results. SEO too is unlikely to be greatly impacted by the launch, at least until users flock to Google+ and a deal is struck with other social media platforms.

It seems once again we’ll have to wait for those involved to resolve their differences before we’ll see any benefit to search experiences. But with social media now firmly embedded in our lives, a search engine successfully harnessing this data seems more an eventuality than pipedream.