This week Google started rolling outGoogle Search Plus Your World, which — besides being the worst case of bad branding in a long time — will cause Google a lot of problems. Searchers will go elsewhere and governments will complain. Here is why.
The idea behind Google Search Plus Your World (let’s call it +World, shall we?) is good.
Personalized and social search
Google has presented personalized search results for a long time, using data from your Google GMail account (if you have one) and your web history. Google has been using these data to build you a kind of personality or interest profile, making it easier for them to deliver search results that are of interest to you personally.
If you are a computer geek, searches for “apple” are therefore more likely to bring up results on the computer company, rather than the fruit or the music company of the Beatles.
Google has also tried to enrich search results with real time data frome the social web. For at time it did, for instance, include twitter messages (tweets), which devlivered information about what is happening right now. This was definitely a good idea.
+World is an attempt to combine the two and add personalized social data to the search engine results. That should be a recipe for success. Instead we believe Google is facing a PR disaster. You see, the implementation of +World is bad, very bad.
Twitter and Facebook not on board
It is not all Google’s fault. The fact that Twitter and Google could not reach an agreement on the delivery of tweets to search results, makes it hard for Google to add Twitter data. Twitter has actually added a rel=”nofollow” tag to links in tweets, efficiently forbidding Google to follow and use those links in its algorithm.
Much of Facebook is also off limit for Google. In other words: There are strict limits to what kind of data Google can fetch from the two most popular social services in the world.
There is nothing to stop them from linking to personal profiles on Facebook and Twitter, though.
Promoting Google+
Instead Google has decided to make use of its own social network, Google+. If you have a Google+ account, you will now find a lot of links to Google+ posts and pages in your search results. (If you don’t, your soon will +World is being rolled out, but is not yet fully launched.)
When I search for “search engine marketing”, for instance, one of the top search results is a link I posted to a Pandia Wrap-up in December, which is in no way useful. Then there are a lot of links to other Google+ posts that may or may not be relevant to my search.
Phil Bailey and Danny Sullivan correctly point out that this favorisation of Google+ even appears if you turn of personalized search/+World. Instead of much more relevant links to content rich twitter and Facebook pages, you get links to less useful Google+ pages.
Lower quality
By adding several Google+ links to the search engine result pages, Google is in effect deluting the quality of search results, making the search engine less attractive for searchers. As Gizmodo put it: Google Just Made Bing the Best Search Engine