By
Joann Pan at Mashable:
After analyzing the Twitter profiles of 36 million users who have generated more than 28 billion tweets (that’s 794 tweets per person in three years on average), Beevolve’s social analytics research reveals user follower bases directly correlate with how much they tweet.
A Twitter user who has written 1 to 1000 tweets has an average of 51 to 100 followers, whereas users who have tweeted more than 10,000 times tend to be followed by 1,001 to 5000 individuals. It’s estimated that a person with more than 15,000 tweets has between 100,001 to 1 million followers.
By Megan O'Neill at SocialTimes.com:
So you’re thinking about making an online video about your brand, eh? As online video viewership continues to boom, more and more companies are jumping on the bandwagon and putting video content online. However, if you’re going to do online video, you want to do it right. Online video advertising and production company Wooshii has put together a great motion graphic with tips on how to get the most from your online video.
Before we get to the tips, here’s a little background on Wooshii. The company was founded in 2009 in Manchester, UK. They boast a creative community of over 7,000 video makers and animators from over 100 countries and their main focus is on explainer videos. They’ve done work for companies from GoInstant to MatchFWD, and Life Technologies corporation.
In their ‘Website and Explainer Video Tips’ motion graphic, Wooshii provides three simple tips that you should always keep in mind when creating a video for your company or brand.
Keep It Short
Wooshii points out the importance of hooking your viewer within the first 15 seconds. YouTube backs this up in their YouTube Partner Playbook (glean more tips from our post on 7 Online Video Programming Tips From The YouTube Partner Playbook). Viewers attention spans are getting shorter and shorter as more content makes its way onto the web, so if you aren’t compelling within the first fifteen seconds your viewer will click away and watch something else.
Don’t Demo
Wooshii explains that, “Like any good pitch it’s about the benefits, not the features.” Feature on the viewer’s needs and not on how your product works. Tell a story that the viewer can relate to. To put it bluntly, people don’t care about you, they care about themselves. Keep this in mind when you create your video.
Keep the quality high
While your video doesn’t have to have all the bells and whistles of a professional, broadcast production, you should still focus on keeping the quality high. A badly made video will have anything but a positive effect on how people view your company. Wooshii explains that you should “make sure the message and the image it portrays are one that you are proud to stand behind.” Because seriously, why would you want to represent your company in any light but the best light?
By Shea Bennett at Media Bistro:
Did you know that Twitter now has over 140 million active users who
tweet 340 million times every day? Or that the average Twitter user has
126 followers, 40 percent of Twitter users never tweet at all and 0.05
percent of Twitter’s total population attract almost 50 percent of all
users?
62 percent of adults worldwide now use
social media, and the UK has the largest saturation of internet users
amongst all countries (at 85 percent). China has 456 million people
online, but that represents just 35 percent of their population. On
Facebook, Brazil has the largest number of online friends with 481,
while Japan has the lowest with just 29. And perhaps most impressively,
in 2011 YouTube had more than one trillion total video views.
These, and other eye-opening statistics can be seen in this video by motion graphics designer Andrej Preston, which takes a closer look at social media in motion.
Via Spice Up Your Blog:
Google want to crawl your content, Google want your content to be easy to crawl, They want your site optimized and if your content is unique and useful they want to rank it on the first page of their results for related searches.
So in this post I have added 10 videos the Google search quality team created this week to help beginners get their sites and blogs on Google.These videos are listed in a 'Step By Step' format and I highly recommend everyone from beginners to experienced bloggers take a look.
By David Harry,
If there's been one thing that tends to get me going, it's when people in the industry start talking about social signals. In particular, Google using them as a ranking factor. Is this truly the case? Or do a lot of folks have it wrong? Or is the answer a bit more complex?
That's what we'll get into today.
For starters, let's get the easy bits out of the way. Most social websites of consequence use the nofollow attribute. This means that the traditional PageRank approach to scoring is a non-starter. Yes, there are those that believe Google is selective in how they treat NF links, I am certainly not one of them.
Personalization & Social
One area to consider of course is personalization. We all know by now that when you're logged into Google these days social elements most certainly can and do, change the rankings and what's shown for a query.
But that is happening because of the relations one has in the social realm. The question at hand today is more about non-personalized search rankings. The concept that a lot of sharing (legit or not) can affect how the core rankings are scored.
Let's consider this study Google did about sharing on Google+. They state:
67.6 percent of all items were shared using Circles and 33.8 percent of items were shared publicly (these percentages add up to more than 100 percent since some users combined sharing options for posts).
Here's the qualitative end of the study, from asking users:
They do indeed have a deeper understanding of sharing that in the past when only accessing publicly available data. It stands to reason that they may see sharing as a more personalized activity than a broadcast channel. In that study they also look at naming conventions for Circles where they consider categorizations of 'life facets' (associations such as work, school etc..) and 'tie strength' (is a circle a catch-all or inner circle?).
You can read the study yourself, but my point is not so subtle: social signals are possibly being seen as personal.
Signal vs. Ranking Factor
We next need to consider that a signal isn’t always the same as a ranking factor. Google has said, (in late 2010), in regards to retweets:
"Yes, we do use it as a signal. It is used as a signal in our organic and news rankings. We also use it to enhance our news universal by marking how many people shared an article."
By and large social elements are for display, more so than as a scoring element that re-ranks results. An important distinction.
Other types of signals can include:
Discovery
Trust concepts (pages and users)
Temporal (velocity)
Context (semantics)
Behavioral
Of the above, the more sensible are discovery and velocity. Certainly it can be said that a page can't rank if it isn't indexed, so social channels can have an effect as far as discovery is concerned.
We also have elements such as the QDF (query deserves freshness). There could be some element of social sharing velocity that could play into that. I'll grudgingly give that some consideration.
As for potential social signals that could be used for search rankings, Bill Slawski highlighted a post about Google's acquisition of some Groupivity/Appmail patents. Some types of implicit/explicit data he highlighted include;
Sending (via email, instant messenger, etc.) a link or bookmark to content to another user
Posting content (e.g., adding to a blog which becomes visible to others)
Applying a label to content visible to others
Making making a purchase or request from a website
Participating in social bookmarking
Promoting or demoting content in search results
Posting comments on bookmarks, news, images, videos, podcasts and other web pages
All are sensible approaches, but they do seem to make more sense in a personalized (logged-in) state than for open search. These forms of behavioral data would make tailoring content more robust and may be too noisy in a normal search setting.
Authority & Trust
Now, if I were to start to consider social as a ranking factor, I'd be inclined to look at how search engines deal with entities and trust. Meaning, the entity that is sharing the content would need to be a trusted source for any search engine to truly use it as a type of (non-personalized) scoring factor.
This is where it starts to make more sense. Social media signals are inherently noisy and spammable. By giving different weights based on known entity data, the lower end of the spectrum would have less, or no effect on search rankings. That can help with spam to a large degree.
Slawski also mentioned the recent addition to AgentRank (patents) doesn't treat all endorsements, (social votes) the same. Saying that, "those endorsements don't impact the content being endorsed directly, but rather indirectly by impacting the reputation score of people being endorsed. Which certainly makes sense. He added that, (...) if you endorse something that isn't worth being endorsed, your reputation score might take a hit."
It becomes about the quality of your interactions, the value of contributions and sharing. In a situation such as this building one's reputation in a social graph is considerable effort, whereas losing it can be easy. Just always try to consider your TrustRank concepts; good links to good, and crap often links to other crap.
Another element is of course categorization of users topically and establishing authoritative topics for each. Looking at some of the so-called 'FriendRank' patents from Google, they talk about categorizing elements of users within the social graph into;
Open Profile (user identification) – Uses identification and scoring/categorization analysis of a user profiles
Custodian profile (content relational) – Looks at inferences between the viewer of a web page and the person that created, or manages it.
Relationships and Topics – For looking at common relationships among users and related topical categorizations (and behavioral metrics).
Much of this seems to certainly show an interest in more refined social signals and social graph targeting. But still we're left to wonder; is Google using them beyond personalization?
Correlation and causation
Recently my friends over at Searchmetrics put out an interesting study that looked at some ranking factors and came to the conclusion (as have others) that social activity correlates well with Google rankings.
The study was fairly broad in scope, something I usually bitch about, (thin data sets in the space). They covered some 10,000 keywords, 30,000 SERPs, 300,000 titles, 338 million Facebook comments, 8.1 billion Facebook likes, well... you get the idea. Massive.
Here are some of the findings:
Of course, we have to state the obvious: correlation is not causation necessarily. Slawski said he's been "a little wary of correlation studies because they sometimes don't tell us things that aren't fueled by confirmation bias or coincidence." In short, unless we actually knew all the factors involved in ranking on Google, it becomes hard to establish exactly what's going on.
That being said, we can surely say that regardless of Google, engaging in social channels would certainly have a direct or indirect effect on the world of search optimization. In many cases the activity results in wider visibility which can lead to links and other signals (as discussed earlier).
What's Google Saying?
Google has said in the past that they "(...) do compute and use author quality and that Author authority is independent of PageRank, but it is currently only used in limited situations in ordinary web search."
Traditionally social signals were used by the (now defunct) Realtime Search and Blog teams at Google. But the last we'd really heard on the matter (from Mr. Cutts) was that they were "studying how much sense it makes to use it a little more widely" in web search rankings.
More recently though on their own sharing system, Cutts has stated that +1s aren't the best quality signal right now.
If I had to take a guess as to what it all means? Again we can see
that Google seems unconvinced on where these signals value lies. If
they're unsure of the value for their own metrics (+1), one has to
wonder how comfortable they are with 3rd part signals such as Facebook,
Twitter or other social services.
The Final Word
And as always I am sure you're sitting there (having scanned to the
pay-off) wanting to know the question we started with: How much do
social signals play into Google rankings?
Don't be daft, I haven't a clue. The destination of this excursion
was one that leaves you to ponder this yourself. When it comes to the
big black box that is Google, we will never know exactly what's going
on. Don't believe all that you hear. Don't jump on each passing bandwagon that meanders down the lane. Think about it first.
To rank based on tweets, Likes and +1s may not make a whole lot of
sense. Does one count a share or a like? What if those change? Anyone
remember that before +1s there was Buzz? How about the Twitter firehose
getting turned off? Oh look, a new site called Pinterest! See where I'm headed?
It makes more sense to look at the users (entities) in the social
graph instead of the actual sites where they're active. Search needs to
be scalable and one would have to imagine that reliance on any third
party site, metric or specific instance (tweet, +1, like etc) seems a
bad choice.
Should you stop all your SEO endeavors and just spam social and links? Probably not a good idea. Ultimately there are many reasons to embrace social media
in your marketing endeavors. Most of them have little to do with SEO.
Embrace it because it makes sense to your business, not because it has
magical ranking powers, and you'll make out fine.
By Zoe Fox at Mashable:
As Google works to improve its mobile product, the company says its
redesigned ads in Google Maps will increase click-through rates by 100%.
The changes will being rolling out for all users Friday.
The new
search results feature larger and more clickable buttons to place calls
or find directions. Websites will load within maps, rather than
launching a separate browser page.
Google is also launching a blue hyperlocal marker, showing your distance from nearby businesses.
Maps
is an important opportunity for advertisers, because 94% of smartphone
users search for local business information. Of those searchers, 90%
make decisions based on the results.
Do you search for nearby businesses within maps? Let us know if these changes sound like improvements for your usage.
By Emily Price at Mashable:
A new site called Octofeed is looking to make reading your Facebook feed a little easier by reducing what you see on it.
The product of programmer David Chin Yee and his wife Jennifer Puno, the site simplifies your traditional Facebook experience, streamlining content and removing some of the app information and ads that can be distracting when looking at Facebook in its traditional form.
Octofeed divides your Facebook
experience into just two things — “My Wall” and “The Feed” — which you
can then toggle between from the top of the page.
The Feed shows each entry from a friend or page you’re following,
with that person’s name displayed large beside it so you can scan
through entries easily. For posted links, pictures and video, the
content will be displayed in the left hand column, while the name of the
person who posted it will appear on the right.
Additional links allow you to like a post, comment on it, or click to see it in its original form on Facebook proper.
Videos can also be viewed from within Octofeed in large form, so you
don’t have to leave the site to see the latest viral video posted by
your friends.
The “My Wall” page on the site offers a similar experience,
showcasing the posts you’ve personally made on your wall alongside those
made by your friends, while content shows up large on the left side of
the page, and information about who made the post displays on the right.
You can give Octofeed a try now by connecting to the site via Facebook.
By Devon Glenn at Social Times:
On Sunday, Twitter aired its first-ever television commercial during the 2012 Pocono 400 NASCAR race. It was a first for Twitter, but not a first for social media. Other sites, including Groupon, LivingSocial, and Google+ have also put their money on big-ticket ads during major television events.
5. Twitter’s commercial features professional racer Brad Keselowski, who first went viral on the micro-blogging site after tweeting a picture of a fiery car crash at the Daytona 500 in February. The ad shows Twitter’s power as both a news source and as a second screen for behind-the-scenes extras.
4. The daily deals sites were among the first to test the waters with television’s biggest commercial event of the year: the Superbowl. Groupon’s 2011 Superbowl ad juxtaposed social causes with social savings in a manner that rubbed many viewers the wrong way.
3. Groupon competitor LivingSocial also aired a Superbowl ad that sparked controversy. This commercial features a cross-dressing discount shopper who says daily deals changed his life, as well as his footwear.
2. The company’s next ad was much friendlier, not to mention gorgeous.
1. In December 2011, Google+ released a trio of television commercials featuring their new video chat tool, Hangouts. The company managed to pack in a lot of celebrities while assuring the rest of us that we can enjoy the tool, too. This one shows the Muppets rocking out to Queen and David Bowie:
By Michelle Maltais at LA Times: The long-awaited Spotify app for iPad is here. And your first reaction is likely to be, "Hey, that's a nice-looking app."
The paid streaming music service's 17 million tracks are now available to Apple's tablet users. The iPad app, Version 0.5.0 of Spotify's iOS app, is iPad-3-ready with Retina graphics and high-definition album art. Users can search for playlists, other subscribers and music from the same view.
The "What's New" section features recommended albums, trending playlists among friends and nearby, as well as new releases. In the search window, the app offers predictive offerings even as you type the first letter. Inbox is where you find music your friends have shared with you in Spotify. And the app works in both landscape and portrait modes, but really it's more attractive in portrait.
The update also brings gapless playback and cross-fading, which is already on the desktop version as of February, and fixes some bugs related to playlists.
Most users are already familiar with Spotify. But in case you aren't, if you're looking for a free streaming option for your iPad, forget it. The app is fairly useless unless you're a premium subscriber.
Users can sign up for a 30-day trial. After that, it's $10 a month to keep the music streaming. You can, however, sync a track from your computer through Spotify.
In the YouTube video promoting the iPad app, Spotify has a bit of fun. We won't spoil it for you. Check it out below.
LinkedIn.com is the world’s #1
professional networking web site with over 130 million worldwide members
(as of early 2012). Leaders from every industry have a presence on the
web site (it’s not just for the business world), and 2 new members join
the site every second of every day, on average. Despite these amazing
statistics, many professionals ignore this revolutionary tool. Of those
who have accounts, very few take the time to design LinkedIn profiles
that represent them well. A well-constructed LinkedIn profile
can be one of your greatest marketing tools for your job search and
career. However, a poorly designed profile can actually damage your
personal brand and lower your perceived value to employers and potential
contacts. Here are the 9 deadliest mistakes you can make with your
LinkedIn profile:
1. You don’t have a professional head-shot (or any head-shot) on your LinkedIn profile.
Most people on LinkedIn ether have no head-shot at all, or they use a
picture where they look unprofessional or unhappy (because they aren’t
smiling). A picture is worth a thousand words, right? Since LinkedIn
is a professional networking web site, your picture should be a
head-shot from the neck-up, and you should be in professional attire.
You should not be wearing a baseball cap or a bicycle helmet, unless
that’s what you wear to work. (Save the casual pictures for Facebook.)
If you don’t have a great headshot picture, just put on some business
attire, and get a friend to take a picture of you up against a solid
white wall. Make sure you look friendly and professional.
2. Your headline is boring or unclear on your LinkedIn profile.
Most LinkedIn profile headlines are dull, unoriginal, hard to
understand, or simply damaging to your perceived value. Like a good
“elevator pitch,” your headline should be clear, original, and
compelling. Your headline is valuable real estate, so don’t waste any
of the 120 characters LinkedIn gives you. Either list one or two
relevant, impressive achievements or a 5-10 word description of how you
make other people/organizations better. If you have space in your
headline, you can also include your email address, so that you are
easily accessible to anyone who wants to connect with you. (Note:
If you are unemployed, do NOT write that you are unemployed. Focus on
past achievements and what you bring to the table for potential
employers.)
3. Your LinkedIn profile summary isn’t impressive.
A great summary should be written to impress your target audience of
employers or your colleagues. It should include your contact
information (your email address at the minimum), several relevant
achievements, your dream or professional mission, and a short story for
why you are passionate about your dream or professional mission. Your
summary should expand on your headline and should also be clear and
compelling. After reading your summary, anyone should know EXACTLY what
you do that adds value to other people/organizations and what you are
trying to achieve in your career. You can write your summary in the
third person, or you can use bullets. Summaries written in the first
person tend to sound arrogant when discussing achievements.
4. Your specialties on your LinkedIn profile are too broad.
As your career progresses, you could have a wide variety of
specialties. However, you should not list every area where you have any
knowledge, experience, or talent. I’ve seen people highlight
specialties as broad as “Human Resources,” “Internet Marketing,”
and ”Accounting” in one LinkedIn profile! If you claim you are an
expert at everything, you appear to be an expert at nothing. Only list
specialties relevant to the career you want to build, and make sure your
specialties are specific.
5. You are not involved in any groups.
LinkedIn allows you to join up to 50 relevant groups. You need to be
active in at least 10-20. If nothing else, it shows that you are
passionate about a topic or field. There are also a number of ways to
build connections through these groups and to learn more about topics or
fields.
6. You don’t have any recommendations on your LinkedIn profile.
Get at least 3 recommendations from clients, bosses, colleagues,
professors, or peers. Focus on quality rather than quantity, although
quantity is definitely not bad either. Don’t just get recommendations
that say how great you are. Get recommendations that focus on results
you have generated (i.e. making a company money, finding new customers,
creating a new program, leading a team or project that produced certain
results, and so on). When you request recommendations, you can also
tell the person writing the recommendation what you want them to say.
This gives you control over what they write, and it makes it easier for
them. Note: Some people will not be comfortable with this, and you can only do this with people you know very well. 7. Your LinkedIn profile does not highlight your past achievements and results.
Like most of the resumes that come across my desk, most LinkedIn
profiles are unimpressive and way too modest. No one cares about what
your past responsibilities were. They care about the RESULTS you have achieved. How have you made other people or organizations better? 8. You look like you don’t know anyone.
All other things equal, someone with 427 connections appears to be much
more valuable (as a connection or as a potential employee) than someone
with 27 connections. Social proof can work for you or against you.
While you don’t need to have 500+ connections, having less than 100
connections is a major red flag these days. It makes you look like you
don’t know anyone or you don’t care about relationship-building. If you
can’t find 100 people you know on LinkedIn (from your academic,
personal, or professional network), then you definitely need to
start making networking a bigger priority online and offline. (Note:
Given their youth, students and recent grads can get away with having
fewer connections. However, they can also really stand out by having
more connections.)
9. You don’t have a Vanity URL for your LinkedIn profile. Use a “vanity” name for the web page for your LinkedIn profile (i.e. www.LinkedIn.com/in/firstnamelastname).
Your vanity name is very search-friendly when people google you. This
is also much easier to include in your email signature (hint) or at the
top of your resume (hint) than the traditional URL LinkedIn gives you
when you sign up for an account. While LinkedIn can definitely help
you get your dream job and advance your career in a variety of ways, a
bad LinkedIn profile can KILL your career! When someone checks out your
LinkedIn profile, they should think “Wow, this is someone I absolutely
need to hire!” or “Wow, this is someone I definitely want to get to
know!” What does your LinkedIn profile say about you right now? -By Pete Leibman, Founder of Dream Job Academy and Author of “I Got My Dream Job and So Can You”
StuffPal is a Facebook app from Los Angeles-based
Loconuts that facilitates the sharing of books, DVDs and video games
among friends.
In the same way consumers can use Keepio to list and sell items through Facebook, they can now use StuffPal
to share their goods. Specifically, the new Facebook app from Los
Angeles-based Loconuts is designed to facilitate the sharing of books,
DVDs and video games among friends.
Users of the app — currently still in Beta — begin by signing in
through Facebook and building a personal media library of any items
they’re willing to lend to friends, including textbooks, music, DVDs and
video games. Friends can then view each other’s inventories for items
they might like to use. If they see something they like, the friends
meet up in person for delivery; a tracking system within the app helps
users stay on top of who has what and when it’s due to be returned,
according to a recent post on Moms Going Green. The video below outlines StuffPal’s premise in more detail:
In today’s tough economic climate, sharing initiatives such as this one
are always going to be popular with consumers, and tapping into a
pre-existing social network seems a logical step for a service that
relies on its users knowing each other. How can your brand help transumers avoid the bonds — and expense — of ownership?
By Joann Pan at Mashable:
If you are tired of seeing the pileup of social content from Google+ friends every time you use Google,
you can now do something about it. Here’s how to get old Google back
and block the personalized results that Google Search, plus Your World
spews up.
When the Google Search, plus Your World update debuted in January, the new Google feature didn’t gain many fans. Twitter and
others criticized the enhancement for bumping up Google+ profile pages
(images, videos and mentions in posts by the 62 million+ people on the
social layer of Google) that relates to your search term.
Many thought the search giant was favoring its own links instead of
bringing up the most relevant links, tainting the progress of the open
web.
Follow the directions in the video to turn off Google’s new enhanced search feature.
By Chris Taylor at Mashable:
Lost the TV remote again? Don’t worry, says Google. In the future
you’ll be able to verbally instruct your TV to turn off and on, change
channel, and even flag the next rerun of Seinfeld for you — all using your Android phone as the microphone.
That’s according to a patent the search giant filed a week before
Apple launched the iPhone 4S and Siri, the voice-based personal
assistant. (Coincidence? Yeah, we think so.) The patent, uncovered by Patently Apple,
describes a system of voice controls that connects to Google’s cloud
services — meaning if you have no data coverage or Wi-Fi where the TV
is, you’re out of luck.
The advantage of doing things that way, however, is that you can turn
the TV on wherever you are, and choose something to fit your mood. So
you could be pulling into the driveway and asking your phone to prepare a
sitcom you can wind down with when you reach the couch. (We’re not sure
exactly how much of a labor-saving advantage that confers, but if
Google also has a patent that can tell your fridge to prepare a beer for
you, we’re all for it.)
Uploaded by Your7ToolstoSuccess :
How to add Facebook comments to your site or blog. Many people dont do
this beacuse it looks a bit complicated however I take you through step
by step so you will find it very easy to do.
Here are the links I talk of in the video.
Link to Facebook Social Plugins: http://developers.facebook.com/plugins
Link to Facebook Create An Application: http://developers.facebook.com/setup
Enjoy
By Brent Csutoras at Search Engine Land:
StumbleUpon, who happens to be one of the more popular and successful social media sites with over 20 million users (doubling from 10 million in about a year and a half), recently launched one of the biggest redesigns I can remember… basically changing everything about the site as a whole.
Having recently removed blogs, themes, and groups
off the site, the new changes continue to move away from any focus on
the site and more towards getting users back into the toolbar, whether
iframed or installed.
Here is a video StumbleUpon released about the new changes:
By Lauren Dugan at Media Bistro:
Late last year, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the Saudi Arabian businessman and the founder and CEO of Kingdom Holding, invested $300 million in Twitter. And he spoke to CNN this week about why he chose Twitter to add to his growing portfolio of tech companies.
As Alwaleed explains to CNN, he’s not new to the tech scene. his company was an early investor in Apple, Amazon and eBay, among other top tech companies.
He says that Kingdom Holding chose Twitter because they believe it will be around for the long-haul:
“We don’t believe we came in at the early stage, but
clearly we don’t believe we came in at the plateau stage. We see that
this company’s viability and its continuity and its resilience will be
there in the decades to come, and that’s why we proposed to be an
investor…”
Alwaleed was also asked about any possible political motivation for
owning a large chunk of Twitter, given that it was instrumental in the
Arab Spring uprisings. However, he responded that this was a purely
economical investment, with no political intentions.
Prince Alwaleed also addresses whether he still feels comfortable
with such a large stake in Apple now that Steve Jobs has passed away,
whether News Corp should become less of a family company, and a new news
channel that he has planned. You can check out CNN’s interview with Prince Alwaleed below:
By Sarah Kessler at Mashable:
Google’s recent change to its search engine is losing in the public opinion arena.
Analysts have suggested the new feature, Google Search, plus Your World, “Pushes Google+ over Relevancy,” and “just made Bing the best search engine.” Twitter called it “bad for people.”
Meanwhile, about 2,000 Mashable readers have answered the poll question, “Would you prefer that Google, etc. go back to their old ‘natural’ search methods or do you find that inclusion of this data makes it easier to find what you’re looking for?” Sixty-three percent of them said they don’t want social search results.
But is the idea behind “Search, plus Your World” terrible? We’re not so sure.
Social connections are a potentially great way to determine relevance. That’s why Google, Bing, Blekko and DuckDuckGo have been incorporating social data into their results long before Search plus Your World arrived on the scene. And it’s hard to argue that some facets of Google’s new search feature aren’t useful. When you search for a name, for instance, the new feature returns results for the “Ben Smith” you are connected to rather than for hundreds of other men who share his name. Adding someone to a social network directly from a search results page? That saves me a step. And there are some searches for which social context is important.
What I dislike about Search plus Your World isn’t that Google has more deeply integrated social data on its search results pages. It’s that the search engine has gone overboard with Google+ in a way that makes me feel like I’m being force-fed a new social network. It’s too much, too soon.
TOO MUCH!
I don’t have a problem with Google showing me what friends have said about a topic on its network or asking me if I want to update my Google+ profile. But I do have a problem with those results being so prominent that they make it harder for me to find the other information I’m looking for. If I want to know that much about what my friends are saying about a topic on Google+ that bad, I’ll search directly from my Google+ account. The same would go for comments made in my Twitter and Facebook networks, if they were included in Google’s social search results.
It’s true that people who don’t want social results can simply hit a toggle switch to return to Google as they knew it last week (in my example above, this would make Justin Bieber’s Twitter page the fifth result), but it doesn’t make sense to me why social results can’t be incorporated less intrusively.
I don’t have a problem with Google showing me what friends have said
about a topic on its network or asking me if I want to update my Google+
profile. But I do have a problem with those results being so prominent
that they make it harder for me to find the other information I’m
looking for. If I want to know that much about what my friends are
saying about a topic on Google+ that bad, I’ll search directly from my
Google+ account. The same would go for comments made in my Twitter and
Facebook networks, if they were included in Google’s social search
results.
It’s true that people who don’t want social results can simply hit a
toggle switch to return to Google as they knew it last week (in my
example above, this would make Justin Bieber’s Twitter page the fifth
result), but it doesn’t make sense to me why social results can’t be
incorporated less intrusively.
TOO SOON!
By some estimates, Google+ is on track to reach 400 million users by the end of 2012. That’s twice as many as Twitter. Google hasn’t released user numbers for Google+, but analyst Paul Allen recently estimated
that the site has about 62 million users worldwide. This means that no
matter their potential, at this point in time, Google+ profiles are
likely not the most relevant social search results.
Including Google+ pages at the top of results, despite the network’s
relatively low adoption levels, makes it feel like Google is using its
search engine to amp up activity on its social network. But Google users
have already made it clear they don’t like it when Google uses one
service to turn them on to another. When Gmail-based Google Buzz
launched in 2010, users complained so much about features that
automatically added frequent contacts to the social network, and linked
Google Reader and Picasa web albums, that Google changed these features four days after launch.
Google could have launched an option for Google+ users to attach
their accounts to Search rather than automatically connecting the
products. It also could have waited until Google+ is more relevant
before increasing the integration of its pages — in-rank with their
actual relevancy — in search results.
What I Want “Search, plus Your World” to Be
I’m not in charge of fixing social search for Google. But if I were, here’s what I would change:
Suggest social profiles from other sites: Right now, Google
only features Google+ pages in the people recommendations it has added
to the right-hand column of results. But these aren’t necessarily the
most relevant social profiles, and they leave out anybody who doesn’t
have an active Google+ account.
Facebook doesn’t let Google crawl its private pages and Twitter adds
“nofollow” tags to links that might help search engines figure out how
its users are related to each other. But, as Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan points out, Google’s search engine does pull up Facebook and Twitter profiles in its search results. It should include those in its relevant people suggestions as well.
Get out of the way: I use Google search to find specific
information. It’s interesting to see how my social network has commented
on a relevant topic, but that doesn’t have to interfere with my search
for that information. Google could put it next to results instead of in
them, as it has with its new people recommendations. It could also put
them in a separate search tab, the way it does with “news” and “images.”
Sarah Kessler writes
about entrepreneurs as well as emerging technology trends in education,
activism and social media. She joined Mashable as a features writer in
August 2010.
Sarah started her career in journalism at a local paper when she was 16
and continued to freelance for a handful of local publications
throughout college. At Northwestern University, she was the
editor-in-chief of a nationally distributed global education magazine
called Abroad View, wrote for the Chicago endurance sports magazine Windy City Sports and co-created a radio documentary that aired on WBEZ Chicago. She also participated in the Medill Innocence Project, which investigates wrongful convictions.
Sarah has written for Sierra Magazine, where she had the opportunity to explore her existing passion for the outdoors, and for Inc Magazine, where she developed a passion for startups.
By Sarah Kessler at Mashable:
The war of words between Google and Twitter escalated Wednesday, as
Google responded to Twitter’s accusation that plans to further integrate
Google+ into its regular search results is “bad for people.”
“We are a bit surprised by Twitter’s comments, because they chose not
to renew their agreement with us last summer,” read a post on Google’s Google+ page on Wednesday, which Google confirmed to Mashable was its official statement on the matter. “Since then we have observed their rel=nofollow instructions.” Rel=nofollow is code that prevents search engines from following links.
Google’s agreement with Twitter gave the search engine access to public tweets. The agreement expired in July and was not renewed. Now Google is implying it was Twitter that chose not to renew the deal.
Twitter had criticized Google’s new social search feature, which it calls Search plus Your World,
on Tuesday. “As we’ve seen time and time again, news breaks first on
Twitter,” its statement said. “We’re concerned that as a result of
Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for
everyone.”
But if Twitter had made it difficult for Google to include Tweets in
its results, which is what Google seems to be implying, it would be just
as much to blame as the search engine for making its breaking news hard
to find.
Reporter Danny Sullivan cornered Google Executive Chairman Eric
Schmidt at CES on Wednesday and asked him about Google’s relationship
with Twitter.
Sullivan told Schmidt he thought one feature of Search plus Your
World, which recommends relevant people to follow on Google+ but not
other networks, is “the equivalent of saying ‘hey, you can only find
information about finance on Google finance. You cannot find information
about finance anywhere else.’”
“Let me remind you that to do the ‘everywhere else’ with Google finance — we had permission,” responded Schmidt.
When Sullivan said he thought Google had enough permission to include
links from networks like Twitter in its search results, Schmidt said:
“That’s your opinion. If you could arrange a letter from Facebook and
Twitter to us, that would be helpful.”
Highlights from the Marketing Land interview
are posted in the YouTube video below. We’ve reached out to Twitter
spokespeople for comment and will update this article when we hear from
them.
Do you think that Twitter was right to complain when Google
integrated Google+ more closely with its search engine? Does it matter
whether they refused Google access to public tweets in the first place?
By Shea Bennett at Media Bistro:
Whichever way you look at it, 2011 was a huge year.
It had more than a little of everything: the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, political scandal and revolution, the deaths of several major celebrities and tech giants, the farce that was President Obama’s birth certificate, a Royal Wedding, the raid on Osama Bin Laden (and Colonel Gaddafi), the ‘Rapture’, the final space shuttle mission, Google+, the London riots, Facebook Timeline, a new iPhone, a world population of 7 billion and, uh, Rebecca Black.
And all of it was documented on Twitter – live, and in real-time.
This video from Jeremiah Warren looks at an incredible year of news on Twitter, as told on a tweet-by-tweet basis.
By Charlie White at Mashable Video:
Have you tried Google+ Hangouts? Apparently, the Muppets have, and Google wants you to know about it.
Here’s a new ad rolled out this week, where you can see a scenario where “famously good friends get together in a Google+ Hangout, to rock out and blow off steam,” to the tune of David Bowie’s classic hit, “Under Pressure.”
