Posts on State of Search about ‘Social search’

“Social Search” goes world wide

_Social Search_ goes world wide - Google, News, Social search - State of Search

Google has announced that it is taking its social search functionality global. This means that now also people outside of the US will get more and more socially integrated search results. This goes from the “shared this” functionality to specific blogs, flickr account and other social media from within your social circle.

Social search results in other languages and on other domains are mixed throughout the Google results page based on their relevance. The results will (for now) only be shown to those logged into their gmail-accounts. (more…)

News near you: local, mobile and personal integrated by Google

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Yet again Google has launched a new feature. And again it seems to be part of their bigger strategy which has to lead to a more social like Google: news near you. If you are an Android or iPhone user living in the US you can now go to news.google.com and you will be prompted with a request to share your location. If you accept, “news near you” will be available.

The feature was introduced by Google News Product Manager Navneet Singh. The new service from Google lets you see news from the location your phone tells you where you are. You can personalize it further on the personalization page where you can determine whether you want news on specific topics. (more…)

Understanding and Controlling your Social Connections

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This is a guestpost by Dean Cruddace, who is an SEO consultant and managing director of SEO Begin Ltd, a North East UK SEO provider since 2001. We got to talk about Profiles showing up in search results and more based on a recent post here on State of Search. Dean was kind enough to share his thoughts and experiences with us on the matter.

Your social connections to you are a click of a button to follow someone/a business/or a product of interest. It’s a less than a second action. We know why we do it. (more…)

Google +1, will it succeed? The experts don’t agree

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With the launch of “+1″ Google seems to have made another step in the revealing of their social layers. This one without a doubt is one of the bigger changes so far. We wrote about it this morning, but we also asked several experts in the industry to shine their light on the matter.

We asked Rand Fishkin, Kelvin Newman, Joost de Valk, Peter Young, Mikkel de Mib Svendsen, Andy Atkins-Krüger, Kristján Már Hauksson, Ciarán Norris and Liana Evans the question “What do you think the Google +1 feature will mean for Google’s social efforts, will they now succeed?”. As you will see, the opinions differ! (more…)

Google +1: the pieces of the social puzzle are coming together

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With the official launch of “+1″ yesterday Google took yet another step towards getting all the pieces of their social puzzle together. After failures with social experiments like Orkut and Buzz Google now has decided it will be adding social features to their search results, so called ‘social layers‘, which eventually will turn out to be Google’s new approach to social.

The +1 button they launched yesterday doesn’t seem to be that new. After all, we have all seen the “stars” in search wiki and the mentions of social sharing on sites like Twitter. But the +1 button does do a little bit more than just that. It is sharing to your own network and it is connected to your Google Profile which seems the be the center of attention when it comes to Google’s social efforts. I’d like to look at some obvious questions with maybe some not so obvious answers. (more…)

Do search and social match? A talk with Joost de Valk (@yoast) and Olivier Blanchard (@thebrandbuilder)

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Search and Social. Are they a match made in heaven, are they enemies or are they something which you should do both, but separate from each other? At the Fusion Marketing Experience (#FusionMex) in Brussels this week (I recommend this conference by the way, very insightful one) I had the chance to put a Social Media expert and a Search Expert next to each other to have them discuss the two.

Olivier Blanchard (@thebrandbuilder), author of the book “Social Media ROI” and a well recognized Social Media expert on the subject of actually making it work business wise, and Joost de Valk (@yoast) a well know search and WordPress consultant, talked about their separate knowledge areas but also how they could merge. The video was taped outside so you might here some background noice.

SES New York 2011: Keynote by Duncan Watts

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So here we are, after a nice flight with the new A380 from Germany, I’m sitting front row to hear Mike Grehan opening the SES New York 2011 making some jokes about PageRank and announcing this year’s keynote speaker Duncan Watts. Duncan Watts is principal research scientist at Yahoo. In his keynote Duncan covered 4 experiments he did on social science.

Duncan starts mentioning Harold Lasswell who tried (back in 1940) to investigate the question: “Who talks to whom about what, through which channel, and with what effect?”. It’s a difficult question because especially in those days it’s tough to measure the “who talks to whom” and the “who influences whom” is even harder! (more…)

Google deleting private profiles by July 31, Googles next social step?

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Something is up with Google and profiles. Maybe the rumors which are going around at SXSW about Google newest social efforts, supposedly called Google Circles, might have some ground after all.

Last week I reported about the new Google Profiles lay out. Google really seems to be moving with the Profiles because The Next Web noticed that on the Profiles Help Page it says “All private profiles will be deleted after July 31, 2011.“. What is Google up to? (more…)

Why Bing will be trailing on Google and why it should hook up with Apple and Facebook

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Bing is doing well, at least, in the US it is. The latest numbers by Comscore show us that Bing increased its share of searches by 1.1 percentage points last month and Statcounter noted that Bing had outgrown Yahoo, but was still trailing on Google.

Bing is not sitting still either, with their expansion to France and new additions to their search results like flight auto suggest and more personalized search options with the extension of the like-data in their search results.

So Bing is doing well, I personally also want them doing well, because I believe we could (especially in Europe) use some more competitiveness. Still, I fear that Bing will be trailing on Google for quite a while and might never even ‘catch’ them. Why? The reason lies in the combination of mobile and personal. Let me explain.

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More Social Elements in Google Search: Twitter not Facebook is the direction

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Google is taking it step by step, a very different way than we are used to in this digital era, but slowly but surely Google’s social face is becoming more visible. The latest additions to the Google search results are yet again another signal of Google’s social efforts.

Googles Social Search has been around for a while now (since 2009) but is only showing a small amount of social elements. Social results coming from tools like Twitter for example, were until now not a very big part of the search result. Google now has started to mix social results, from for example Twitter or blogs, with other results. (more…)

Matt Cutts confirms: social signals do matter, also looking at author reputation

A few weeks ago Danny Sullivan wrote a very interesting article on Searchengineland in which he discussed the use of social signals in the rankings of both Google and Bing. He had approached representatives of both search engines who both said they were using Twitter and Facebook links as a ranking signal.

In his webmaster help videos Matt Cutts last week confirmed this. And not only that, he added some more information to it. He said that they are also “trying to figure out a little bit about the reputation of an author” on Twitter or Facebook, something he said they didn’t do in May this year. They changed that since May. See the video here:

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Is this the new “Google +1″? Leaked screenshot might indicate more

We’ve been talking about “Google Me” several times before here on State of Search and almost always it has been ‘guessing’ about what it would be. Sure, we’ve seen some of the new social layers popping up, like social sitelinks, hotpot and “shared by“. But we’ve never seen the real “Google Me”, which is expected in spring 2011.

Last week it became clear that the internal name used for the project was no longer Google Me but “Google +1″. But still we didn’t have a clear idea of what it would be. But today Techcrunch received a screenshot which very well might be what we can expect from “Google +1″. (more…)

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