Google’s Social Search Experiment
Working in SEO, it’s always useful to keep an eye out for news stories that relate to technological advancements, particularly if it involves the internet or search engines specifically. Google rarely fail to disappoint with this and so my attention this week was drawn to their announcement of their intentions to embrace the social media phenomenon.
Making Money from the Social Web
Over the past 18 months, companies have been capitalising on the worldwide interest in social networking sites, using them as a key marketing tool by capitalising on search, advertising and user generated content.
Google, the world’s biggest search engine provider is one such company taking strides into this media trend with the planned release of ‘Social Search’, a new project planned to give the search engine a makeover.
Search Engine Benefits
The primary idea behind ‘Social Search’ is based on personalising the results produced by the search engine. Most people on the web make social connections across a variety of interactive media websites and publish web content in numerous ways such as blogs, status updates and tweets. ‘Social Search’ will analyse and use this information to translate the content into special relevance for each person in regards to the results it produces.
Using the information from the public profiles people have created with Google and other connections across the social web, the searches will produce friend’s reviews and comments that they have made previously on the nature of the subject you are searching for. There is a concern by some that this infringes on privacy but Google have declared that all information is taken from that which was already freely available on the web.
Possible SEO Implications?
When discussing changes to search engines, this inevitably could have an effect on business rankings and ultimately SEO strategies.
Manipulation of social media sites as a marketing tool could lead to businesses using ‘Social Search’ to target specific audiences with reviews and product updates as a way of furthering their search engine optimisation.
Tags: Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO, Social Media