Editor’s note: This article was first published in February 2011. Google Social Search and the integration of Twitter, Flickr and Quora content it describes belong to that period and no longer work this way; the market share figure is from 2011.
Google keeps making changes to its search engine. This time it is an update to its Google Social Search tool, and the inclusion in its search results of information from Twitter, Flickr and Quora.
As a result, Social Search results will no longer appear at the bottom of the page. Instead, they will be mixed in with the rest, showing users when a link was shared by a friend or contact. Now more than ever, to be more visible online and improve your ranking in search results, we will need to interact more on social networks.
For example, if you search for a hotel in Paris and a friend wrote a post about it or shared a photo somewhere online, it will show up among the search engine’s top results.
The company also explained that, to protect internet users’ privacy, it will let users control their accounts and decide which of the information they share they want to be public and which private, that is, visible only to certain people.
In addition, to make it easier to find relevant terms that appear on social networks such as Twitter, Flickr and Quora, Google will integrate them into its search results.
That way, if someone searches for “Eiffel Tower”, for example, the results will include recommendations from friends or contacts on Twitter, images from Flickr, or ideas and questions from the social network Quora, no matter when they were posted online.
Google’s change is undoubtedly significant and will give a boost to the search engine, which holds a market share of more than 65%. It is worth remembering, though, that the company left Facebook and its “Likes” out of its social push, a feature that Bing (Microsoft), one of its main rivals, does have.
Further reading
Featured image: x76882, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
