For Google, the bet lies on ‘personal’ aspect of search. The company now claims to explore your very own world, and the roll out the customized results. It will throw up only those results from billions of Web pages that are highly relevant to a specific user based on the material you and your Web-based connections share.
Adding a personal touch to search
The idea, as the search engine giant puts it, is to serve up pages, which bring your personal world to the fore through search, taking a salvo at Facebook for in their battle for eyeballs and ad revenues. Google is keen to neutralize its social rival’s growing influence by adding a personal touch to its engine in order to bring back users by combining the search engine function with Google+, its nascent social network.
Market analysts describe this as a significant step in the realm of search – namely, Search plus Your World – via a personal anecdote when you use Google. This move is aimed at delivering results that take into account not only immediate content requirements but also a user’s mindset and their relationships.
Blending public and the private worlds
For this, it’s extending the scope of search beyond public So webpages to the posts and photos photos shared privately come into play. As you key in a person’s name, Google will automatically recommend people you may be interested in. It’s also guiding users to profiles as well as Google+ pages that relate to the topic.
Until now there was no connection between one’s Web search results and one’s personal information. Not all users would want or even understand why personal information is part of search results. The company says it will explain the rationale to users at the top of pages as why it’s making certain information more visible. This may invite resistance similar to that faced by Facebook after rolling out Timeline.
Google is not asking users if they want this new feature, and just turning it on. In case you don’t want it, you’ve to turn off the same. Twitter has already raised a murmur of protest about the Google feature. Its official reaction was as follows:
“For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results any time they wanted to find something on the Internet. We are concerned that as a result of these changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone.”
A move to promote Google+?
The new feature apparently tends to promote Google+ over its social rivals – by design or by default, which could lead to regulatory scrutiny even as the search engine giant is already facing antitrust investigations in Europe and the U.S. Incidentally, Google is not the first engine to do so. Microsoft’s Bing in an alliance with Facebook, has already been tapping some part of information shared on the latter. But Google’s move has attracted greater attention owing to its total dominance in search.
