Google Makes Search More Social

Posted on: 5:50pm, 2011 March (Wednesday 9th) By: Carlos Rodrigues

Google recently announced some updates that brings social even closer to search.

Whilst most of these changes are only relevant when you are signed into your Google account it still signifies Google’s ever increasing desire to rank real time, personalised and content from trusted sources within search results.

The main changes to Google’s Social Search updates are as follows:
1. Social content from your connections will be bumped up the results (these currently show on the bottom of the page).

2. Utilising content from your social connections to display in results. For example if you’re searching for ‘Liverpool FC’ and your connection has publicly tweeted about ‘Liverpool FC’ the results may show in your search.

3. Google is now giving users the ability to connect multiple social profiles and link them privately within your Google account.

Checkout the video to discover more about the changes:

With these changes coming into play it’s a real opportunity for brands to really start leveraging social media to increase visibility in search results as well as driving brand engagement etc. For example, if a fan is following and engaging with a holiday brand on Twitter and they search for ‘Flights to Barcelona’, Google may then pull up the tweet from that brand offering sale flights to Barcelona. This brings the brand directly to the attention of the user and offers a value exchange.

Whilst I haven’t seen the new social search updates integrated into my search results to date, I’m sure it’s just a matter of time until we see this rolled out across Google.

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