Are Google’s Search changes unfairly putting Google+ content above other social media sites?

In October 2009, following the partnership of Bing and Twitter, Google announced a similar partnership whereby Google would include tweets in search results to serve the most up-to-the-minute results for search queries.

That agreement with Twitter came to an end in July, one month after the release of Google+, and ended Google’s real-time results in search. Bing and Twitter say they have continued their partnership as of September 2011, but there are no tweets or any sort of real-time results in Bing search today—not even for topics that are trending on Twitter. So, while they may have a partnership, it isn’t clear what they are doing with it.

With the release of Google’s Search, plus Your World there is a lot of discussion about Google forcing its social network on users in an effort to push out the competition: Facebook and Twitter.

This has been reinforced by comments made by Twitter:

“For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results anytime they wanted to find something on the Internet.

Often, they want to know more about world events and breaking news. Twitter has emerged as a vital source of this real-time information, with more than 100 million users sending 250 million tweets every day on virtually every topic. As we’ve seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter; as a result, Twitter accounts and Tweets are often the most relevant results.

We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users.”

Twitter believes it is being intentionally suppressed, and that it’s bad for the world.

However, in November 2011, Google released an algorithm called Freshness. The goal of Freshness was to quickly crawl the web and find up-to-the-second results for trending and news worthy topics in order to serve searchers with the most relevant and up-to-the-minute content possible. This has, in effect, gone out around Twitter—to some degree. Where a trustworthy news source may have written an article about breaking news and released it to Twitter instead of waiting for search engines to crawl their content so it could be found, now Google will find this breaking news through Freshness and serve it at the top of search results. Which areas will it miss that Twitter may be correct about? Things like Egyptian protests, and the here-and-there tweets about some major development that isn’t being covered by major news organizations? But is their fear really valid?

Let’s explore.

With the violence that broke in the Middle East this past year, a lot of the news came to the United States and other nations through Twitter and other social media sites. A lot of major news organizations failed to cover the stories in a timely enough fashion for news hungry searchers, and Al Jazeera English picked the stories up and became the source of a lot of news for many people. For those who could not get televised broadcasts of Al Jazeera, mainly people in the US, they turned to the web and Al Jazeera’s social profiles, such as Facebook and Twitter. I was one of those people.

Once major news organizations realized that they were losing audience to Al Jazeera, they picked up the stories and began coverage. Al Jazeera remained the most up-to-the minute reliable source other than nationals within the countries themselves, but, at that point, it was easier to find news and information about what was happening in the Middle East. While Twitter played a launching role in these developments, I don’t see Twitter’s role as being so influential in the future. Now, Al Jazeera is on top of social media and locating breaking news, and other news organizations also have their ear on the pulse of social media. What made it possible for the tweet to be found to begin with was that the Twitter user had a network who shared, and their networks shared, and so on. This is how social media works. If something breaks on Twitter, and it matters, people will pick it up and share/retweet. Whether this trends or not, those tweets can go directly to the Twitter accounts of news organizations to alert them to the news worthy story. The same can be said of first-hand footage of the Japan earthquake and tidal wave of last spring or events in the Sandusky trial. Twitter is no longer the only way to find news and updates on these major current events.

On a side note, tweets from individuals have little ability to be proven by 140 characters alone. When pictures and video are shared, it carries more weight and is more likely that news organizations will pay attention to it. So, there is room for a tweet alone to abuse the power of tweets automatically being included in search results simply for the keywords they may contain. Tweets should be verified before they are spread to the masses via a major player like Google , whose credibility will automatically be put behind those results and can be put on the line as a result. If Google cannot crawl the links in tweets and verify the sources and weigh their credibility, then I cannot imagine Google is comfortable putting their “relevance” stamp of approval behind Tweets.

A quick disclaimer: I am uncertain of the specific limitations standing between Google and Twitter users’ status feeds.

What does this have to do with Google’s Search, plus Your World? It means that Google has the searcher and its own well being in mind—not taking over the social media world and squashing Twitter through intentional suppression. Furthermore, this change isn’t mandatory. There is a button in the upper right-hand corner of the Google search screen that allows you to toggle between personalized search and un-personalized search (although, this is only relevant if you are logged into your Google account). If you are not logged in, you will automatically be served un-personalized results. This does not mean you won’t see a change in your un-personalized results, check out this article by Danny Sullivan about the change in relevance for Google search results.

I ran a test to see if Google’s new search method unfairly suppressed Facebook and Twitter results, as is being claimed by a number of people. On a test with all of the same advance search options (US-based, English results, most recent search results, etc.), I found that Google was the only one of the major three engines to include results from Tweetmeme and other sites that measure and report of Twitter trends; Facebook showed up for all three. I ran it a few more times on other topics trending in Twitter. Twitter profiles for individuals whose names were trending showed up in all of the search engines,including Google. Their Facebook profiles showed up in Google and Bing. None of the search engines showed an actual Tweet as a search result. So, if Google is suppressing Twitter, then so is Bing.

I re-ran this test again on Jan. 16, 2012, and found that for the term “tony allen,” which is trending in Twitter on that day, a tweet shows in the number two spot on both Bing and Yahoo. There are no Tweets in the Google feed. But it could be argued that the Google results are more highly relevant to the query—the tweet is fairly ambiguous. If I tailored my query in each search engine to look for “tony allen” only on site:twitter.com, Google’s results certainly leave something to be desired.

But if I changed the topic of these queries from Tony Allen to MLK (Martin Luther King), the results show something entirely different.

Google has indexed more recent Twitter status updates for the query “MLK” than either Bing or Yahoo. So, Google still seems to be the better place for up-to-the-minute, relevant search results.

Finally, Google results from Google+ were non-existent. For Google+ to be pushing Twitter and Facebook out of SERPs, it will have to increase in number, frequency, and be relevant to the topic—just like any other search results.

I believe, as I have always believed in regard to Google, that the main goal is to make each user a segment standing alone. Who you are, what you want, what you are looking for, and care about are unique to you. Google wants to give each user the most personalized and relevant online experience possible—that way they can tailor their advertising to you specifically and get the best conversions and ROI possible for its advertisers.

Lorianna Sprague is an SEO specialist with Web Talent Marketing, a growing Internet marketing company in Central Pennsylvania that servers medium to large companies nationwide.

I suspect a lot of people in the UK have never heard of Post Rank—or at the very least have rarely used the service beyond tinkering. But for more than three years, this has been the bread and butter of blog analytics for both me and the clients I have built and serviced blogs for.

In short, Post Rank attributes a value to each social gesture that a reader may perform on your blog. So, if you look on the left of this blog, there is a list of posts which have attracted a score depending on their popularity. Retweets score differently to bookmarks, comments receive a different score to Facebook shares, and so on. The hugely important distinction to make, is that whilst the values do not necessarily mean anything in any financial or volume-based context we may already be familiar with, the system allows us to set targets and assess something that we are all looking at: attention and authority.

Any post can be widely read—but if nobody re-tweets it, is it in any way influential on that topic? In the same way that Facebook Likes, Retweets, Diggs and so on each represent a modern day “vote” of favor to a piece of content, Post Rank allows you to collate all these votes and provides you with the intelligence to shape your content plan to ensure that it is relevant more often than not, and in being relevant, stands much more chance of being re-posted (and seen) elsewhere.

I have developed over time, a methodology of posting content by very specific content categories (based on conversation monitoring), which is then measured against a Post Rank score for each category of post. Depending on the score of each post, we accurately know what type of content is most responded-to by the audience and can therefore post more content of this type—whatever it is.

Social Search Engine Results Pages

But what does this have to do with the future of search? Look at where search has gone over the last few years and the overwhelming focus has been on addressing the volumes of social content on the web.

• Universal search introduces video (typically from YouTube) and images alongside standard search engine results pages (SERPs).
• Google’s Caffeine update places more influence on delicious (among other things).
• Real-time tweets for popular topics appear alongside “static” SERPs.
• The Google avatar of friends in your network who have shared content that appear in SERPs are visible.

And so on …

The point is, that without any doubt, google’s issue has been one of attributing human “votes” to content. Post Rank fills this gap.

Take a look at its Google Reader filter below, and you can begin to see just how Post Rank’s system can provide such huge feedback on human votes of confidence in content.

I can now filter my Google Reader content according to what Post Rank has been able to determine are Good, Great or Best (or all) score. This means, it is giving me a score based on the human voted-for scores of content that is out there on the web.

Google Reader is giving me the most relevant content as judged by the interactions/votes of my peers and indeed the myriad people who have also “voted” for this content by sharing, rating and bookmarking it.

Granted, it may not be the most recent (and I have to admit, I don’t know how frequent post rank indexes the content, but it seems pretty instant).

A Ready-Made Human Recommendation System

So, in Post Rank, it would appear that Google is acquiring a ready-made system that provides the much-lauded human attribution of search relevance. What it will look like, maybe the above graphic gives us some clues, but I just hope they maintain the service as-is and not let it disappear like they did with Jaiku. Post Rank, please tell us one way or the other!

Sure, we occasionally read original content based on an original thought or study results that cast a new light on previous perceptions or a new technology in town. But, realistically, how much content can marketing writers and publishers contribute to social media and publishing without sounding redundant? Is there anything new under the sun anymore?

Now, before you jump down my throat and tell me I’m nuts, let’s do an experiment. Enter the following in your browser search bar:
“Does your website build trust?”

What do you get? In Google, I got about 12,200,000 results that include the following organic listings on the first page alone:

• 47 Simple Ways to Build Trust in Your Website or Blog
  Some major points: Make it personal; website design is first impression; use appropriate language (i.e. to your segments); use good grammar; never lie to make money …
  
• Build trust: the most important online value
  Some major points: Write in simple language; be personal; update content often; professional-looking graphics …
• 40 Ways to Build Trust in Your Brand on Social Media
  Some major points: Create meaningful and thought-provoking content; no hard selling
• 11 Reasons Customers Don’t Trust Your Web Site
  Some major points: Each typo a user finds puts another ding into your credibility; keep your website as fresh and up to date as possible; don’t use buzz words …
• 15 Ways To Build Trust In Your Website
  Some major points: An attractive website displays professionalism; adding personal flare; add new content whenever you have the chance,…

Are you bored yet?

I suppose if you’re new to a topic, then reading the same points in each article is comforting. At least, that way, you can assume the information is credible. But, what if you’re looking for something NEW—something refreshing on the same topic? Then, this can become a frustrating experience.

So, here are my questions for the content creators:

• How do you write fresh marketing content?
• Do you think fresh content matters?
• Where do you get fresh ideas that haven’t been rehashed a million times?

Oh, and one more thing … I did a search on Google: “Rehashing: The New Boring Marketing Concept,” and guess what? Nothing came up —yet.

Does Google have any idea how long would it take me to go through 64 Million responses? One day we are going to look back at the days of searching and getting 64 Million responses to anything and equate that to a Commodore 64 or Betamax tape.
I know, I know the point is Google is trying to bring me the best responses to the term in the first few pages (if not the first page). But the best responses according to who? Why don’t they know I work at Avaya (who sells products and services in the VoIP space) and therefore I most likely have a very different mission in typing in VoIP?
Microsoft just launched Bing a new search service which is supposed to rival that of Google. To me it looks like Google but in a new wrapper with a few enhancements. This post is not an indictment of Bing, my point is they didn’t take it far enough.
Someone can (and will) connect search to my social profile (say on Facebook) thereby making a truly intelligent search engine that will know where I work, and who my friends are. Then when I Google a term like VoIP …. it will know I work for Avaya, it will know my friends and can present me with a way to filter the web based on my social profile …. call it Social Search.
Then I will be able to narrow down a search for VoIP down in seconds based on the company I work for, members of my marketing team, friends I have in my network and get a completely different view of the internet that I can’t get now.
24 months from now Social Search should be common place …. we should see social tools like Facebook Connect or OpenID which are already out there, used for search. I feel everyone wants to make the search market more competitive (right now Google has 87% of the US marketing and 90% of the European market) so perhaps Yahoo or AOL can revive their search business by going Social!
For more ideas like this please check out my latest eBook called 7 Ways Facebook will Change your Life!

Bob’s quote really struck a chord with me because it’s a simple reality that many organizations are either overlooking or ignoring today. People are starting to view the Google search bar as their URL entry box. Instead of typing “www.zappos.com” people are simply typing the world “Zappos” into a search form. An excellent piece on ReadWriteWeb provides further insight into this rising habit.
What this means for companies is that their homepages should no longer be considered the most highly trafficked resource for people looking for their product. Consumers are becoming savvier, and an unfortunate consequence (for brands) is that people are more likely to trust third party resources vs. the brand themselves.
Because consumers are no longer spending as much time on the tightly controlled environment that brands build themselves, companies, more than ever, need to be fully aware of the search results that are sharing space with them and hopefully taking steps to make those neighbors ones that raise the value of their real estate.

Is Google the Big Winner Here?
Does the above situation translate into a need for all of a brand’s paid listings to pop up when users search for them? To Google’s dismay…not necessarily. A brands biggest concern should not be that their competitors sites are popping up in paid listings next to theirs, their biggest concern should be the negative pages that show up in the results organically. Those are the listings that are much less in Google’s control and more in the hands of consumers/brands.
Shopping for groceries is a great example of the above. You go down the canned food isle. You see that there are diced tomatoes being sold by Dole and Del Monte. They are both about the same price, size, and are located on the same shelf. If you don’t have a preference, you’ll end up just randomly picking one. Next time, you’ll pick the other. Now let’s say the situation is slightly different. You walk through the same isle and on the way to the tomatoes you see a small sign on a now empty shelf that says “Del Monte canned peas have been recalled due to a case of E-Coli.” The peas probably have nothing to do with the tomatoes you want to buy, but odds are when you get to the tomato shelf, your decision on which tomatoes to buy is no longer a 50/50 split.
But my tomatoes don’t have E-Coli!
There are great brands with great products. So much time, money, and resources are put into creating those products and then getting those products into the hands of consumers. That effort should not diminish when the product changes hands.
Just because there are people who are writing about your product on Yelp and GetSatisfaction, doesn’t mean you have to sit back and watch your search results get contaminated. No one is barred from producing content on the web. A brand has just as much right to talk about their great qualities and respond to those who disagree.
It may not be possible for a small team to compete with the entire voice of the internet, but it can definitely help. People want to engage with the brands they use. If an irritated customer posts a review on a site it may get a handful of comments, but if a representative of a brand posts something, it will be dramatically more populated. Those subsequent comments may not all be positive, but they all lead to an initial thread in which a brand got to voice its honest thoughts and show that it took an interest. A thread which in many situations will show up higher on a search results page than a very negative post that has just a few responses.
Reacting to others isn’t the lone remedy either. Creating great content around your product in pivotal to your organic search success. A big part of Google’s secret formula for organic search is traffic. If you build it (something great), they will come. The better something is, the more traffic it gets, the closer it will rest to your ideal search results.
So a microsite isn’t enough?
The key takeaway here is that when planning out budgets for consumer facing entities, the microsite simply cannot take the full budget anymore. The microsite certainly serves a purpose (as does investing in SEO to bring it higher up), but the majority of brand/consumer interactions are taking place in the domain of the consumer’s choosing. Subsequently the brand has no other choice but to focus a larger chunk of its efforts to optimize the content being created by their consumers and their critics.

Here’s what I mean: I travel a lot. And when you travel a lot you discover a lot of important things. You learn the answers to crucial questions such as: Why is a dog a man’s best friend? Because a dog always welcomes you home and a dog thinks everything is a great idea.
Right now, as I write this, our dog, Bran, is lying behind me. When I throw a glance at her, she responds immediately, gazing admiringly. “You work too hard,” she seems to be saying. “Have a break.”
Outside my window, Frodo, our cat, sits preening himself. When I catch his attention, he stares back at me. “Open the window,” he seems to be saying. “Like, now.”
Web sites are generally designed by dogs. There’s a lot of optimism. The dogs look at the site and think of it as an endless attic. No matter how much stuff you into it, there’s always room for more. The dogs approach each design step with a “have gigabytes, must fill” enthusiasm.
Dogs think it’s great fun thinking of all the cool new things you can do. They love picking colors and moving things around. They love choosing small font sizes and grey text; coming up with new ways to navigate.
Dogs are very egalitarian, particularly when it comes to navigation. They never want anyone to be lost anywhere on the site. So they create all sorts of navigation, ensuring that no matter who you are, no matter what your interest is, not matter what page on the site you are on, there will always be a link just for you.
If dogs had their way, then every single link on the website would also be on the homepage. In that way, everybody would be one-click away from finding everything they ever wanted to find. That would just be so cool.
Dogs love content. As far as dogs are concerned there’s no such thing as bad content. Dogs will always give you 100% effort. And if just one person out of 7 billion is interested in this piece of content, then dogs want it published.
Dogs are fascinated by technology. All you have to do is say words like “portal” or personalization” or “new content management system,” and the dogs just start yelping and jumping all over the place. Installing new software is just like going on the biggest, baddest walk and finding the juiciest, smoochiest bone along the way. It’s a dog’s dream.
And then cats have to manage the Web site. The dogs let everyone publish and the cats are certainly not going to review all this stuff. The dogs created an architecture where everyone can find everything and now nobody can find anything. The cats shake their heads.
The dogs thought the mystical, magical search engine in the sky would solve everything. The cats know that’s like two-month old pie in the garbage can.
Sure, we need dogs’ enthusiasm, but we also need to bring the cats into the planning and design meetings.

1. Identify the top 200-400 search terms on your website. These top 200-400 terms will usually represent a very significant percentage of search volume.
2. Identify the correct search result for each of these search terms.
3. Test each of these top search terms in your search engine.
4. Measure how often the correct result appears in the first three results. (Research shows that 60 percent of people will click on one of the first three results.)
5. Compile a success rate. You will then be able to say something like: Our search has a 45 percent success rate. Then you can plan for how you will increase that success rate.
This is just the first stage in professionally managing search. The next is to identify the search component in key organization tasks and to show how improved search improves task completion.
I once asked a senior manager in an insurance company why management in his organization didn’t care about search. Their search was pretty awful but there were no plans to do anything about it.
His reply was that search was this vague thing that nobody was really responsible for. In his opinion, until improvement in search was directly linked to improvements within the key functions of the business, it would continue to be ignored.
He gave an example. He said an important business metric was the annual cost of managing existing customers. If improved search could be directly linked with reducing this cost, then that would surely get attention.
For certain organizations it may even be the case that search does not add enough value. There are many websites where navigation is much more important than search. For example, Gap.com doesn’t have a search engine.
What is certainly true is that you don’t need a poorly performing search engine. If you can’t allocate the resources to manage search professionally, then it is a much better management decision to get rid of your search engine.
You may also find that as you improve the quality of task completion on your website, your search activity will decline. We once worked with an intranet where it was very difficult to find correct office and building location information.
Nobody really owned location information and, as a result, a huge variety of maps and directional information had been created over the years. Much of this information was out-of-date and/or poorly designed and confusing.
This location information was cleaned up. A new office locator was launched, which was much more accurate and easier to use. What was interesting to note was that as the office locator became more popular, the number of location-type searches in the general search engine showed a significant decline.
We are only at the beginning of the information revolution. Search, by definition, is a frustrating and unproductive activity. As we design better websites, and as people become more familiar with the Web, search activity will decline.
Search in itself is never the objective. You search for McDonald’s not to find McDonald’s, but because you’re hungry and you want to eat a Big Mac and fries.

After a few turns they end up in the garden. They backtrack, apologize for their ignorance and ask you again for directions. You give them what you believe are even clearer instructions.
They head off. They still end up in the garden. They are getting a bit desperate at this stage.
A neighbor is working in his garden and smiles knowingly. He shouts some instructions about how to find the toilet. The guest hurries back into your house and, following the neighbours’ instructions, quickly finds the toilet. Later that night, the guest mentions the kind neighbour that they talked to in the garden. “Oh, you met Mr. Google, did you? We’d never find anything in this house without Mr. Google.”
In many situations it is easier to find something on a Web site by using the public Google search engine than by using the site’s own search engine. This is an incredible situation.
Think about it. Google, which indexes 12 billion pages, is doing a better job than, for example, a search engine that indexes 12,000.
This situation says less about the excellence of Google and more about the poor state of information management in many organizations. A great many organizations simply don’t professionally manage their information. They simply store it. All that is about to change.
It is about to change because Google is worth $150 billion. The stock market knows about value, particularly future value. The stock market is telling us that Google is one of the most valuable companies in the world. It believes Google is doing something that has great present-and particularly-future value.
What Google is doing is managing information in a way that makes it fast and easy to find what you need. Why is this important? Because, these days, before making key decisions, people are increasingly going to the Web to become better informed.
Information is becoming increasingly critical to the success of the organization. It’s just that most organizations have not recognized this, and have therefore not put proper information management structures in place. So what will the information manager of the future look like?
Their primary focus will not be on the information itself. It will not be on how to create, edit and publish content, although these are all important activities. No. The Web will radically change how we manage information, because for the first time we can systematically measure its impact.
Information management will focus on the result. It will ask the question, “What was the person trying to do and did our information help them do it easily and quickly?” They say that actions speak louder than words. Well, the future is about
managing the actions that result from words.
In other words: The success of Google proves that if you manage content professionally, tremendous value is delivered.

MAY 12, 2017 – BUSINESSWIRE. Mountain View-based search giant Google Inc. today announced they’ve acquired the internet for the astounding sum of $2,455.5 billion in cash. The deal had been rumored in various search blogs since the beginning of the year and was now confirmed by the company’s CEO. “This is in line with our vision to make information more accessible to end users,” says Eric Schmidt. “With the acquisition, we can increase the speed of indexing as everything will already be on our servers by the time it’s published.”
In a conference call earlier today, Larry Page explained the strategy behind the acquisition. “We realized it’s not very cost-effective to buy the internet in smaller portions.” During the past two decades, Google had acquired YouTube for $1.65, DoubleClick for $3.1 billion, AOL for $12.5 billion, and last year, Microsoft for the record sum of $120 billion.
Questioned on the first steps the company would take integrating the internet onto their servers, Eric Schmidt announced immediate plans to redirect Yahoo.com to Google’s own search engine. “From an end user perspective, having two search engines is just bad usability, and [causes confusion]–.”

More:

Accompanying Google’s acquisition revelation, privacy groups today released a paper criticizing the move. However, Larry Page argues that privacy is improved by Google’s acquisition, explaining that “[the] main privacy issues for users today are data leaks to third parties. By eliminating all third parties, we closed this hole.”

Read Philipp’s very funny, and freakishly real, full vision here.
Follow up: Heebie Sudoku asks, “Why doesn’t Google buy Wikipedia?”
Hat tip: Greg Verdino.