Google+ Gets Big Push With New “Search Plus Your World” Feature

Google+, Google’s six-month-old social network, is getting a huge push with today’s announcement of “Search, Plus Your World” – a dramatic change to Google’s search results. With “Search, Plus Your World” (let’s call it SPYW going forward), Google will begin polling more content from Google+ (and photos from Picasa) into its main search results: content […]

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google-plus-red-128Google+, Google’s six-month-old social network, is getting a huge push with today’s announcement of “Search, Plus Your World” – a dramatic change to Google’s search results.

With “Search, Plus Your World” (let’s call it SPYW going forward), Google will begin polling more content from Google+ (and photos from Picasa) into its main search results: content shared with you — even privately! — on Google+, content that you’ve shared there, Google+ user profiles and Google+ pages, too.

Google has also added a new toggle button that lets users turn the SPYW results on or off.

Today’s announcement is the latest step in Google’s heavy push and commitment to Google+. Last summer, Chairman Eric Schmidt suggested that “everything [at Google] will move over to using the + infrastructure.” Google+ content has been showing up more often in Google’s search results since then. Google+ has also been integrated with Gmail, YouTube and numerous other Google products. And the company has done some high-profile TV ads to promote Google+.

Is it working? Well, Hitwise research a week ago showed that Google+ had its biggest traffic month yet in December.

Over at our sister site, Search Engine Land, Danny Sullivan has a very in-depth look at today’s announcement, including potential privacy and competition concerns that it may raise:

Google’s Results Get More Personal With “Search Plus Your World”

There’s also a lot of coverage on Techmeme.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Matt McGee
Contributor
Matt McGee joined Third Door Media as a writer/reporter/editor in September 2008. He served as Editor-In-Chief from January 2013 until his departure in July 2017. He can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee.

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