Is Too Much Plus is a Minus for Google?
On Tuesday, Google announced something called Search, plus Your World (SPYW). It marked a startling transformation of the company's flagship product, Google Search, into an amplifier of social content. Google's critics—as well as some folks generally …
Context & Ripple Effects
Google entered 2012 still trying to establish Google+ against Facebook, as reflected in a comparison of Google+ and Facebook, while its brand-page rollout problems exposed how hard it was to make the social service useful to organizations. Folding social material into its dominant search product gives that effort a much larger distribution channel.
The change also arrives after Google and Bing limited link and keyword data available to publishers and SEOs in 2011, making any new social influence on search visibility harder for those groups to measure.
First-order effects
- Google Search users receive social content alongside conventional web results, while Google gains a direct way to expose its social layer within its flagship product.
- Publishers and SEOs must account for social content in search visibility with less link and keyword data than they previously had.
Second-order effects
- Google's social-product rivals face a distribution disadvantage: Google can connect social activity to searches already made on Google Search rather than relying only on visits to a separate social destination.
- Publishers have greater incentive to cultivate material and relationships that surface socially, because search discovery is no longer solely a matter of web-page ranking.
Third-order effects
- If social integration becomes a durable ranking and presentation layer, search competition shifts from indexing public pages alone toward controlling both the query and the social signals surrounding it.
- The move puts more of online discovery inside large platforms, increasing the importance of transparency around how social material is selected and displayed.
The trend: Search is evolving from a neutral-looking index of web pages into a platform-curated discovery product that blends social signals with results.