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Google now offers results sourced through personal connections

Danny Sullivan has a great piece over on Search Engine Land explaining his sense of disappointment in Google’s new “Search plus Your World” feature. I think Google’s move is unpleasant but not a surprise. It’s unsettling to those of us who’ve watched Google’s rise from the very beginning and saw the company as a precisely-engineered “fairness engine” – we’ve watched and listened to the public persona of that fairness, Matt Cutts, discuss exactly what measures Google was taking to ensure that the results given by Google search were objectively the most relevant and useful.

Google has always sold us ads alongside the results, but that’s always been a simple, tit-for-tat type of transaction—we give you the best-engineered search results in the world, you agree to some clearly-delineated advertisements in the margins of those results. We got it. Google started blurring that line not too long ago, with such features as pushing their flight search results ahead of other organic results for travel sites.

Still, the travel info doesn’t push you toward a particular vendor and, as Sullivan points out, up until this point, Google has been pretty happy to send you off to wherever you’d like to go, even if you’re not getting the end result, product or service from them.

Search plus Your World (a terrible name, really) changes all that by pushing Google’s own social network, Google+, and its results at you. Google is apparently showing more info from its own network in the results because the other two monster social platforms, Facebook and Twitter, don’t provide deep enough hooks to allow Google to index them the same way.

That’s true, but it’s almost beside the point: Search plus your World is a ham-handed effort to push more users and page views into Google +. Google has never been shy about encouraging the use of complementary products and cross-selling services, but I think the uproar about this particular feature is due to its incorporation directly into the search results. That box in the middle of the page with the organic results has always been considered by most to be inviolate, a safe zone enforced by objective technologies and people dedicated to making sure that the results are driven by quality and nothing else.

By rolling in Google+ results (and omitting Facebook and Twitter, both of which, admittedly, Google has legitimate reason to omit), these results no longer possess that oracular objectivity. Google’s previous social experiments with search were more or less open to all. This change appears to push Google’s social network to the detriment of others, and that’s what the ruckus is all about. Google knows that the future of search is going to include social components—that’s why they launched Google+ to begin with—but they appear to be getting there in fits and starts.

As always, caveats apply—the feature is optional, and it isn’t purely restricted to Google+; there are other results out there (Matt Cutts has a good defense of the variety of results here). And like everything Google releases, this will likely change or could even go away. But it can’t help but feel a bit like a naked grab for more Google + usage, and while there is absolutely nothing commercially wrong with promoting another Google product, it makes those previously hallowed organic results seem just a little less sacred than they used to be.

– Brent Buford

Brent on Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | Tumblr | Flickr

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Can you organize all your relationships?

Is Google+ actually going to make our lives (and privacy) more organized and compartmentalized? That seems to be its primary appeal. Where Facebook bolted on group management as an afterthought, Google+ encourages you to approach your online socializing via distinct circles from the very beginning. For those who are already well-organized and mindful of privacy and sharing, neither service offers much advantage over the other one in terms of real privacy protection. Google+ may be easier (and a lot more fun) to manage and setup, but both offer control over what you share and whom you share it with.

A few years back, when Facebook saw a rising threat from Twitter, they responded with numerous changes to make users’ status feeds real-time and to encourage widespread sharing by default. In other words, Facebook wanted you to tell the world about the pancakes you just made, as opposed to just your friends. This backfired, and Facebook has, in various ways, been twisting in the wind when it comes to privacy ever since then.

A Metaphor

Managing privacy on Facebook is a lot like trying to organize your very messy home by going to the Container Store to find boxes to sort and store everything. It’s feasible, but it’s a pain, and you wish you had been more organized in the first place. Google+ forces you to go to the Container Store and buy those boxes before you even move in. You can’t bring your stuff into the house until you’ve decided how to organize it.

That’s fabulous — Google has approached privacy from the ground up, as opposed to tacking it on after the fact as Facebook has done. There’s a catch, though: If you’re disorganized and you don’t care about messes, forced organization isn’t going to change that. You can organize everything in boxes before you move in to your house, but if you’re a messy person, within a month or two you’ll have crap all over the house again. Structure imposed up front can be as ineffective as structure imposed after the fact – if you’re allergic to structure, it’s useless. I’ve watched Hoarders.

All us geeks over here with our GTD methodologies and EFF memberships eat up this structured privacy stuff. And you could argue that the “Circles” concept itself is a more accurate and relatable metaphor for human interaction, and could encourage non-techies to think a little harder about what they’re posting online. There’s no shortage of interesting research on this topic; it’s odd, though, that the primary researcher behind Circles left for – you guessed it – Facebook.

Technology enthusiasts reside in a massive echo chamber. The “consumerization” of technology may be progressing rapidly, but that doesn’t mean that your mom or your cousin understand that online privacy isn’t an all-or-nothing game. Most people tend to share or they don’t; if selective sharing were an important feature for the average user, Twitter wouldn’t have over 100 million users.

Creating circles is one thing. Maintaining them, as Kevin Cheng notes in a perceptive post here, is entirely another. Google should be applauded for making privacy a focus of its new social network, but it remains to be seen whether Circles will be useful for the long term management of the real mess of human relationships.

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If you’ve explored social networking with Twitter and Facebook, there’s a chance you might have noticed the “field trial” launch of Google’s next social networking product, Google+, last week. I say “next” because Google has thrown a number of social products at the wall over the last decade (Orkut, Wave, Buzz) and none of them have turned out to be very sticky. Google+ may change that. I’ve been using it for about a week, and it’s an interesting hybrid of Twitter and Facebook that could give both of them a run for their money.

Before we explore Google+, a little background. Google has been losing engineers and executives to Facebook for a couple of years – Facebook has largely supplanted Google as the “hot” internet company, and Google has been unsuccessful in building any kind of social functionality into their products, much less in creating a social networking platform out of whole cloth. But Google has something now that they’ve never had before: big-time market share in something other than search. For years, Google has tried to bolt social features (and many other things) into their search product, but most users want search to stay simple and straightforward.

But then came Android. Google’s smartphone platform has taken the mobile world by storm, grabbing up market share quickly through a savvy combination of giving the operating system away for free and allowing carriers and manufacturers to customize it to their liking. Android represents an unprecedented opportunity for Google to “bake” their tools and software into a phone, thus capturing yet more eyeballs for their real core business: selling advertising.

Where does Google+ fit into this? I think it’s do or die: Google can’t afford to have tens of millions of smartphone user eyeballs sucked into competing social network platforms. Facebook is, at heart, a massive photo-sharing network (the largest one in the world, actually). Smartphones are rapidly becoming the primary method of taking pictures; the image quality is fabulous, and it’s a camera that you always have with you. Is the social networking battle really as prosaic and simple as photo sharing? Of course not. But don’t underestimate its importance. If you want confirmation, look no further than Google’s recent decision to roll its own photo sharing service, Picasa, into Google+ itself.

Google’s biggest problem, and consequently its primary threat, is that with the unfettered proliferation of junk web content, search and advertising may soon be effectively restricted to “trusted” sources – that is, you’ll be more likely to seek out things via the people you know rather than using a general-purpose search engine. Facebook is growing like a weed, and their advertising platform boasts a level of personal targeting unavailable in Google’s products; forget about keywords and geotargeting – Facebook knows what your friends like. That’s powerful stuff, and Google doesn’t just want a piece of it; they view it as a threat to their very existence.

Inside Google+

So, perhaps the strangest trait of Google+ is its current lack of any kind of advertising. It’s a smart, though transparent, tactic – encourage early adopters and influencers to join during one of Google’s trademark (sometimes years-long) “beta” phases and then blend in the advertising model later. Like Wave a few years back, any new Google product announcement causes the entire tech community to salivate like hungry dogs, scrounging for precious invites. With Wave and Buzz, the hype was met with a resounding “huh?” once users got access. I don’t think that’s going to be the case with Google+.

First of all, Google has just recently gotten the User Experience religion, which you can see in the new version of Gmail’s interface and improvements to their SERP (search engine results page). Google+ actually looks like UX designers had a hand in it, rather than just engineers. In fact, it’s less visually cluttered than Facebook itself, which seems to be in a constant battle between feature cramming and interface cleanup.

Second, Google+ offers an interesting (and possibly superior) alternative to  Facebook’s “friending” – a system called Circles. Circles are easy to organize visually and, perhaps more importantly, don’t require the same type of explicit approval, notification and reciprocation that Facebook requires. Facebook accomplishes this by bifurcating relationships into “Friends” and “Fans” (the latter primarily for celebrities, businesses and organizations); you can become a fan of something without any kind of reciprocal approval. It’s vastly superior to a business having to approve thousands of friend requests, but it makes the “fan” type of interaction much less personal.

Circles allow you to manage both personal and “fan” relationship seamlessly and mix them together however you like (it may, in fact, offer too much freedom and control for the average user). You can draw the lines wherever you want, and while the party you friend or follow might reciprocate, they never have to in order for the whole thing to work. In that sense, Google+ is an interesting hybrid of Twitter and Facebook, and Google has clearly learned from Facebook’s own missteps trying to craft a “real-time” status feed as Twitter’s popularity began to soar. Where Facebook has bolted on, Google has re-thought from the ground up, and it shows in the simple management of relationships and status.

That’s not to say that Google+ is anything revolutionary. If you were color-blind, you might have a tough time distinguishing between the two at first glance (Facebook’s trademark blue has been toned down to neutral blacks and grays on Google+). Let’s not mince words: Google+ is a blatant attempt to rip off the best of Facebook and Twitter and create a competing social network platform. It is, at best, an incremental improvement over existing technology. It will initially appeal to early adopters, Facebook haters and über-nerds like me who have to have their hands on every new bell and whistle that comes out.

I haven’t mentioned a few other marquee features of Google+, because I don’t think they’ll make much difference in the social network arms race. “Hangouts” are video chat rooms, and Sparks are topic-specific news feeds (like RSS). Neither of these are compelling reasons to pick one social network over another. In fact, constantly slapping new features and tools into social networks can backfire – witness the continued appeal of Twitter, with its restrictive format. Both Google+ and Facebook could learn a lesson from Twitter and offer better compression or summarization of feeds; my primary complaint about Google+ is that a single status update, with an article excerpt, link or video, often takes up an entire screen. It certainly doesn’t encourage the quick, cursory skimming that Twitter excels at.

The Mobile Gorilla in the Room

But all of this may be academic. Google will be successful with Google+, and not because of nerds, early adopters or tech writers like me. Google+ will be baked into Android handsets (the Android app is already available) and Google will put every ounce of its muscle into adoption on the mobile side. I expect Google’s nascent local deals business and Places to all flow through Google+ shortly. Consider all the first-time Android phone buyers out there (and there are millions and millions of them): if Google can provide the right combination of incentives and simplicity to push even half those users into Google+ for something as simple as photo sharing from their smart phone, they’ll build market share faster than you can spell “Zuckerberg”.

Is Facebook scared? Should they be? Maybe. Facebook has built an unbelievably large, loyal user base and has shown over and over that even egregious missteps fail to generate any substantial abandonment of the service. Ultimately, the two companies are coming at revenue from opposite ends: Facebook has built market share with your relationships and is only recently beginning to monetize it; Google has been monetizing content for years and now wants in on your relationships. I don’t think Google+ will result in a massive exodus from Facebook, but if it steals advertising dollars, that may be all Google needs to call it a success.

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