The Homa Files

TakeAway: Google’s making  another attempt to break into into the social web by creating a “plus one” feature for its search results.

Much like on Facebook, you will be able to share your likes as well as see other people in your network of contacts’ and the things they like. 

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Excerpted from AdAge, “Google Adds Own ‘Like’ Button in Foray Into Social Search” , March 30, 2011

Google‘s take on the “like” button — the “plus-one” —  to make search more social, and to combat the growing dominance of Facebook.

Google will allow users to vote plus-one on search results and to share that preference in Gchat, Gmail, Google Reader, Buzz and, soon, Twitter.

This is the first time Google has added a direct social signal into search results.

Over time, Google will integrate the plus-one into the search algorithm itself so human votes will have an impact search ranking.

“Injecting a social layer into the algorithmic search is key to relevance… 35,000 results in less than 3 milliseconds. It’s meaningless, but if you can sort through those by people who have given a social signal and those rise to the top, it can only enhance the user experience.”

The question is whether Google can keep bad actors from gaming the plus-one system for fun or for profit. Google, to its credit, has a lot of experience filtering out attempts to game its algorithms..

Edit by HH

This entry was posted on April 6, 2011 at 6:26 am and is filed under Internet - Soc Networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.