CONTAGIOUS MAGAZINE / GOOGLE+ AND THE RISE OF SOCIAL SEARCH

In the latest issue of Contagious, our very own John Ridpath takes a closer look at Google+, which launched this June, and provoked a heated debate around whether the platform could be a credible threat to Facebook or Twitter. He suggests, however, that our attention should be focused less on its social networking functionalities - Circles and Hangouts - and more on what it means for the service at the core of the company's business: search.

The rise of social search is huge news for brands. Every user of Google+ will receive a unique set of results for each search, helpfully informed by their social graph. So whilst traditional approaches to Search Engine Optimisation will remain important, social is going to be an even bigger priority. If brands want to maximise their search ranking, their content will need to be worth sharing.

Social search should be understood as part of the ongoing trend of personalisation on the web. For sceptics like Eli Pariser, author of The Filter Bubble: What the internet is hiding from you, there is a danger that personalisation leads to people only seeing results that reflect their own interests. But - for now at least - Google's searches are clearly signalling the provenance of social results, which will make people more aware of that subjectivity.

And it's not just Google that is in on the game. For more insight into how social search works, what it means and who the big players are, subscribers can download the full article here.

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