Tweak Your Biz » Technology » Google Might Improve Your Relationships

Google Might Improve Your Relationships

by Neil Sisson on January 11th, 2012
15 Comments



Google’s mission has always been to provide the best possible search results for their users, they recognise that that is how they established market dominance and to their credit they have not gotten lazy about maintaining that dominance.

But how do you provide relevant, useful, and personalised results for everyone based on their individual and unique preferences? Well in the last quarter of last year Google announced an experiment on Google Labs called Social Search.

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Google has now unveiled their newest offering, which they’re calling “Search, plus Your World”. This is basically the result of their Social Search experiment with some new features. The nuts and bolts of the idea is that by offering “social” search results as well as the regular results, it will give the search results a more personal and more effect layer of information.

So what is Social Search?

Let’s say you got hit on the head and suddenly found Death Metal appealing, but you didn’t really know where you could go in Dublin to see a good Death Metal band playing. In days gone by chances are you would go to Google and type a search query along the lines of: death metal gigs Dublin January 10th.

In all likelihood you would then need to browse through numerous forums and possibly the odd Death Metal enthusiast’s blog or venue website. It is possible you will find the information because it is out there if you are persistent enough, however it will be time consuming and you will most likely end up taking a recommendation of a gig from someone you don’t know if you can trust on a forum you’ve never visited before.

With Social Search you will now also get some results which display information from your Social Circles. “Social Circle” is the term Google use to describe the people you know, are connected to on various publicly accessible social networks, your Gmail chat contacts, and through your Google+ Profile. People that are friends with your friends (2nd degree connection) are also part of your extended social circles.

So in this new world of Social Search, let’s say you have a friend who has a friend who is a hard-core Death Metal head, and they have posted an update on their Twitter page about a gig they are really looking forward to. This tweet will show up in Social Search, along with information about how you are connected to the person, so you now have a recommendation from someone that you can somewhat gauge the quality of the recommendation.

What this means for your business?

As I hope you can see from the example above Google have made a huge first step in search to not only understand content but also how people interact and their relationships to each other. A case might even be made that because of easier access to the information you are looking for, from your friends and connections, that your existing relationships will be strengthened online.

To my mind this development in search technology means that your customers will have quicker, easier access to the opinions of people they trust about your products and services. This can only place even more importance in monitoring what is being said about your brand on social networks like Google+ and Twitter.

To take it one step farther, the value of these “publicly accessible” social networks has increased with this development because the more active you are on them as a business now, the more likely you will be to show up in a connections social search results.

I’d love to hear how you think this development will change things for you in the comments below.

Will it have a positive or negative affect on your business? Will you be doing anything differently now?



Category: Google, Search engines, social media

Tags: , , , ,

The Author:

Neil is passionate about Inbound Marketing, Social Media, SEO and good Website Design. He works with businesses and organisations all over the world to help them be more effective online. Neil is the Managing Director of Lime Canvas a website design and inbound marketing agency and he organises the Dublin WordPress meetup group. Connect with Neil: LinkedIn - @neilsisson - Google+ - Facebook http://www.LimeCanvas.com

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  • http://twitter.com/fredchannel Fred

    Nice on Sian.
    While reading your post, I couldn’t stop thinking about how much time business owners waste in general for not being able to delegate. I still have that problem too, pretty often. There’s always something telling us that we must be there all the time and in control. It’s good to be on top of your business, but being on top of everything, including tasks that someone else can do better is not good. I guess the first step to overcome this is to understand that we must delegate even though it sounds obvious…

  • http://www.seefincoaching.com/blog Elaine Rogers

    Hi Sian,
    What a great post – what I love about this post is it is honest, personal and makes total sense :)

    I understand what you say about efficiency for customers, and delegation so I would add here, in order to be EFFECTIVE, we must outsource the tasks we are not effective at, or efficient, and allow the experts take control of what they do best.

    I have had to do this recently with my new business, and am so happy I did. The accounts is a funny one for me. I have a great person I can hand over to, and I am still hanging on, with about 6 weeks to go to D-Day – eek!!

  • http://www.btbtraining.com/blog Niall Devitt

    Sian, If you put this together with Una’s post, I think you have a series yet practical recipe for success. I think Fred raises an interesting point about not being able to delegate. Great read, thanks.

  • http://www.stress-solutions4life.com/ Catherine Connors

    Great post Sian, like Niall and Fred I think you raise an interesting point about delegating, its true that you really don’t have to do everything yourself, either at home or on the job. If other people can do a task then why not let them? Its about letting go of the need to control every step (easier said than done I know) but by doing so you will let go of some unnecessary stress also……

  • http://www.tweakyourbiz.com Niall Devitt

    Hi Neil, welcome to Bloggertone and thanks for the great first post. I think Google are on to a winner here, for me this where the next stage is at, combining search with social. If this works well, it’s going to be very useful, particularly as you say when it comes to searching for real-time info. Thank for letting us know! Niall

  • http://twitter.com/antonmccarthy Anton McCarthy

    Great post! I think that social has been a tough nut to crack for Google for quite some time, but they have really made a serious breakthrough here. The goal was always to make search more personal, more social – because it’s about getting reliable and trustworthy information when it comes to making decisions – and the most reliable info is always going to be that which comes with the seal of approval or endorsement from friends and people you know and respect.

    The example relating to music gigs you gave is an excellent one – I have always wondered why finding gigs I want to go to has to be so challenging on Google (you need to check individual band websites, or trawl through forums, or perform multiple searches with slightly different keywords!) – search becoming vastly more social is something that will plug these gaps in a unprecedented fashion. Exciting times, and I believe this will be an enriching experience in people’s lives!

  • http://www.encouragingexcellence.ie/ Mairéad Kelly

    Thanks for explaining it so clearly Neil.  I’d read a piece on it earlier and it didn’t appeal to me at all, in fact it made it sound very intrusive. It’s one of those things that will have to be balanced to be effective methinks.

  • http://www.facebook.com/NeilSissonBusiness Neil Sisson

    Well actually the information is all already available on-line, its just now you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to find it ;) So there shouldn’t be any issue of intrusion because Google is only accessing data you will have already chosen to publish on Twitter or perhaps your Google+ account.  

  • http://www.facebook.com/NeilSissonBusiness Neil Sisson

    Yeah I agree with you Anton, I think with this the global village just got smaller but also more local in a sort of a paradoxical fashion.

  • http://www.facebook.com/NeilSissonBusiness Neil Sisson

    Thanks Niall.

  • http://www.smartsolutions.ie/blog/ Elaine Rogers

    I remember 15 years ago in South Africa using “the internet” to research passage to South America. The search terms were something like “cargo ships asia south america”. I bet if I now typed “Cargo ships offering accommodation passage from Capetown to Buenos Aires” I would most likely get exactly what I need. 

    Actually I just did in Chrome and the second listing was exactly what I would be looking for! It reminds me of programming languages, getting more and more like normal English. And user friendly technology (except for TV remotes). Now if between my iMac and Goolge I could get an espresso in the morning, I would be even happier :)

    A great first Bloggertone post Neil, welcome!

  • David Quaid

    Its a nice post Neil but I’m not so sure I entirely sure that that is how it will work. People in Social Media marketing have often equated “share” as being 100% the same as “support” or recommend. I know that many people will read this and be completely puzzled because we’ve all accepted that share is incontrovertibly the exact same thing as “I recommend this to you my [league of extremely loyal] followers [sheep]”

    The biggest problem that absolutely nobody in Online marketing wants to face up to is that this is 50% theory and 50% speculation but 0% proven.And Personalised search still hasn’t made a big leap in Ireland – 5% of search at best (and I’m aware Android requires you to login etc).

    Just because we’d like it to work that way – doesn’t make it so. I’m not saying that personalised search and social inclusion won’t happen or won’t work – I’m saying its definitely not going to work in a straight line like this.

    Take Elaine’s very good example there – how many people does Elaine know in her social networks who’ve gone from Cape Town to South America? Where is social search going to kick in there?

    I tend to avoid buying the same things my friends buy. I trust my social network even less.

    The reason search has always been critical to the internet (and it was before Google just as it is now. Google didn’t invent search, they perfected it) is because its random. When you start getting the same sites you always click on (e.g. Google Personalised) or the same links from Mashable from your twitterstream, then you’ve stopped using the internet. You are now just playing catch up with the guy beside you. And that’s not why users swarm to the internet…..they can do that offline

  • http://www.cgonlinemarketing.com/ Christina Giliberti

    ‘Devil’s advocate enters the conversation ….’

    Opinions drive sales – true. You listen to personal views and it draws attention to a page.
    However,
    1) the amount of social updates could be overpowering with the social search, and

    2) it takes out the neutrality of search and moves into a whole new world of advocacy

    Then again, you could argue that this is already the case….but I like the fact that Google search is more neutral and that I can discover new sites that match my queries. Otherwise you’ll end up seeing the same sites over and over. Evenually people will band together and monopolise search results.

  • http://www.webhostingmadness.com/ Best Hosting

    Google always give best and suitable search result for his searched user and Google sometime show omitted results as well so that user can be find his/her query from that result. 

  • http://www.nintendo.com/leaving?destination=http://www.articleteller.com.au seo articles

    I really love your video presentation.  I blog quite often and I genuinely thank you for your information. This article has really peaked my interest. I’m going to take a note of your blog and keep checking for new information about once per week. I subscribed to your Feed as well.

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