Move Over Search Box, Google's Home Page Gets A Share Box
If you still don't get how much Google is behind ensuring Google+ gets everything it needs to succeed, consider the screenshot below, showing how for the first time ever, Google's home page now lets you do something other than search.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google's home page has been a search box and little else for over a decade; putting a share box on it is the first time the company has given the page any function beyond search, and Marketing Land reads it as evidence of how far Google will go to give Google+ distribution. The move has a lineage: Google tried a sharing feature once before with Google Shared Stuff back in 2007, which never gained traction, and the company has shown throughout 2011–2012 a willingness to reshape long-standing properties — as with the Product Search overhaul and Boutiques.com closure — when a product needs repositioning.
First-order effects
- Google+ gains placement on what is arguably the web's most-visited page, letting signed-in users post shares without ever leaving Google's front door.
- The change puts Google's own social product ahead of third-party results on the page where hundreds of millions of sessions begin daily.
Second-order effects
- Facebook and Twitter now compete against a rival that controls the default starting point of the web, turning distribution rather than features into the battleground for sharing activity.
- Publishers and marketers who treat the Google home page purely as a search entry point have to account for a second behavior — direct sharing — sitting on the same surface.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Google's home page stops being a neutral search utility and becomes an activity hub for Google's own services, raising the structural question of how much self-preference one company can layer onto the web's default gateway before regulators and users push back.
The trend: Google is converting its search monopoly surface into a distribution channel for its own social products, repeating the playbook of folding new services into the properties users already visit by default.