Velocidi

Google recently added features to its search algorithm connected to Google+, the company’s social network. The features include:

• Personal results – This extends the search for a specific term deep into content shared by your Google+ friends, followers or brand pages you are connected to; locations visited by your friends; pictures containing tags related to your search that were taken by your Google+ friends, and so on. The example below shows a couple of result pages -- note how the returned results relate to me via my friends:

• Profiles in search – This is the ultimate vanity search. It goes through Google+ and all the rest of the web, displaying a blueprint of the person’s digital activity.
• Related people and pages – This brings up Google+ members and brand pages that are related to the search terms. These are not necessarily accounts that you are connected to, but if there are any relevant ones that are in your circles, they will appear at the top.

So, what does all this mean for marketers? It changes the whole idea of SEO and shifts attention towards social. At a tactical level, it means that, as a brand, if you have a Google+ presence, your name has a better chance of appearing on that golden first page of Google searches. And if people are talking about your brand, what they are saying will have a better chance of appearing within that first set of results. 

It will take a while to reverse engineer the new algorithms, but once we do, we will have a much better idea as to how we can leverage this new search paradigm for better marketing results.

What’s clear now, however, is that Google wants to push its own network. While we can hope that eventually Google will find a way to incorporate all relevant chatter into the results, including Facebook and Twitter, from a technical perspective it’s pretty easy to do – in fact, we’ve already done it. 

Introducing NoisySearch

Below is a link to a simple Google Chrome Browser extension that allows you to expand your Google searches into you Facebook stream. Oh, and it also works for Bing. 

Check it out here – and let us know what you think!

Post by Ovi Roatis, Velocidi's Director of Technology. Follow Ovi on Twitter: @oviroa

This article is part of a two-part series on Google search. Check back later this week for the second post in the series, from Velocidi's EVP of Client Service, Gary Goldhammer.