It appears that Google search results are undergoing one of their biggest facelifts to date with last week’s introduction of Search, Plus Your World. This new feature is taking content that you share privately and combining it with matches from the public web and mixing it into a single set of listings. The changes are live but in order to see the personal results you need to be signed into your Google account. When you are signed into your Google account and doing a search on Google.com , it gives you the option to show personal results blended with public results, or you can choose to do a purely public web search. You will find an icon in the top right section of the screen that has the two options.
Below is what the search bar looks like as you are doing a search that includes personal results:
And you will see a separation between the numbers of personal versus public results:
The new feature will be great for people who are interested in finding privately shared content amongst their friends as well as public content without having to go to multiple places to do your searching. However, there are growing concerns because privately shared content may appear to be public when in fact it is not. Also, there is the possibility of people having more information shared amongst friends and family than they had initially intended.
Google has come under a bit of fire from other social media related companies such as Twitter. They are arguing that this new feature is leveraging Google’s search results to favor its own content and push out competitors. This is because Search, Plus Your World is currently only showing personal results from its own social media network, Google+. So why are results from the others such as Facebook and Twitter missing? According to Google, “Facebook and Twitter and other services, basically, their terms of service don’t allow us to crawl them deeply and store things. Google+ is the only [network] that provides such a persistent service, of course, going forward, if others were willing to change, we’d look at designing things to see how it would work.”
Several blogs are being written on this new development from Google in an attempt to better understand its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. As for the privacy concerns people have, it really just comes down to a simple piece of advice; don’t share anything that you would regret if it found its way into the
public domain. It will be very interesting to see how this new feature evolves. To hear about it straight from the source, check out the Official Google Blog.
