Google understands the importance of social media marketing and has been putting in a lot of effort in making Google+ a success. The efforts include heavy promotions, including TV ads, and the integration of the social product with its core services. Continuing this trend, the search giant has launched a new update that fuses Google+ and the core search engine. The latest update is called ‘Search plus Your World’.
In short, ‘Search plus Your World‘ means a greater degree of automatic personalization of search results. Signals drawn from users’ Google+ Circles will be used to emphasize the things shared by the users themselves and their friends. The regular search results and personalized ones will appear side-by-side. Photographs shared either on Google+ or Picasa will also be pulled up. This will happen even if the images are marked private, but in such a case they will be visible only to the owner.
For instance, if you search for ‘Harry Potter’, the regular search will throw up links to the films, books and fan sites. However, if you are logged in to Google+, the results will also include the pictures of Harry Potter shared on your profile and relevant blog posts shared by friends. The images will appear both in the regular search and image search.
Although this seems like a small step, it signifies bigger future changes. Integration of Picasa and Google+ is just the beginning. In the coming years, we may also see results from Google Contacts, Docs, Gmail, Wallet, Voice and more.