Mountain View, California — Striving to retain its supremacy, global search engine leader Google Inc., on Wednesday expanded its social offerings, taking on Facebook’s “Like” Button with a button of its own, the “+1” Button, empowering users to personally endorse search results and Web pages, its latest attempt to stave off rival Facebook Inc while trying to jump on-board a social media networking boom.
Interestingly, the supposed service dubbed as “plus one,” will display a small “+1” icon that will become visible next to Google search results for select users from Wednesday, allowing people to endorse specific search results to friends and contacts by clicking on that button.
For instance, if you enjoy a particular sites’ content, click the icon to share that preference with your connections in Gchat, Gmail, Google Reader, Buzz and soon on Twitter, and when someone in your network searches for something similar, your +1 will show up in their results.
Users will see both the total number of plus-one votes, as well as the names and photos of their contacts who have stated a preference. Ultimately, the feature may begin to influence the ranking of search results, though that is only under consideration. Results are now ranked via a closely guarded algorithm.
“Our objective at Google is to get you the most relevant results as quickly as possible,” Rob Spiro, a Google product manager, wrote in a blog post Wednesday. “But relevance is about relationships as well as words on webpages. That is why we recently started to include more information from people you know — stuff they have shared on Twitter, Flickr and other sites — in Google search results.”
“The beauty of +1’s is their relevance and today we are expanding that a step further, empowering you to share your recommendations with the world right in Google’s search results (because they come from people who matter to you), at the right time (when you are actually looking for information about that topic) and in the right format (your search results),” Spiro, wrote in a blog post.
Furthermore, Google is currently unveiling the +1 Button over to a limited number of “select” users, but soon users will be able to opt in, via Google’s experimental search site. And it will be the +1 Button that Google is hoping users will use to give their seal of approval across the Web.
Besides, the search engine giant also explained that appending the button to websites will be easy, giving Google fans the option of giving a +1 to participating pages outside of Google.com as well. Google is also adding the ability to vote plus-one on search ads.
According to internal tests results, which revealed that plus-one votes increase clicks; Google would not impose any charges for the functionality, but expects better ads to return more plus-ones and, in turn, more clicks. Higher click-through rates can improve quality scores, meaning marketers with better ads could pay less for a given keyword or position.
“We will provide reporting in AdWords for plus-ones,” said ads group product manager Christian Oestlien. “Our principle is that advertisers will see increased performance from ads with personalized annotations.”
“When someone recommends something, that is a pretty good indicator of quality,” said Matt Cutts, Google’s principle engineer for search. “We are strongly looking at using this in our rankings.”
The whole concept is similar to that of Facebook’s Like Button, which is rapidly spreading like wildfire to many popular websites across the internet — including news agencies looking to increase online readership.
This novel transformation are some of the biggest to the visual architecture of search, the classic list of blue links, as well as its functional underpinnings. It is the most aggressive foray into social media search to date and the first time Google has added a direct social signal into search results.
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