Google has launched (and is now rolling out) a new social addition to its search results a Plus 1 Button, the button will allow users to recommend sites and share these recommendations with their friends.

Similar to Facebook’s “like” functionality it looks like we will start to see more and more reliance on the personal preferences of an individual surfer (and their friends) in the search engine results.

The recommendation will (where appropriate) influence the ranking within the organic search results.  The impact will be seen within the context of similar / relevant searches, even then the results are unlikely to catapult a site from zero to hero so no need to panic.  In short the likely impact will be to make certain sites more visible.

The company has used social clues from the likes of Twitter and Flikr to impact the results for over a year so this is part of a trend.

The feature will be extended to websites in due course.

I wonder how long it will be before someone link baits “Google Plus 1 Button the Death of SEO”.

What are your thoughts; obviously the button puts another tool into the arsenal of the search spammer.

Google are Beta testing Social Search, a facility that shows relevant results from your friend’s social media pages including the likes of Blogger, Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin etc.

Essentially Google are trying to present us with the most relevant information, our friends and connections are like us, so it follows that we are interested to hear what they say about the places, products and services that we are interested in.

To make social search work a user must have and be signed into their Google Profile (http://www.google.com/profiles) they must also connect that profile to at least one social networking site so that Google can start to identify their “Social Circle”.  When a user searches with their Google Profile enabled Google will find relevant public content from their friends and contacts and highlight it within the search results.

Google have been gravitating towards a more personalised search experience for some time http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/02/personally-speaking.html and have also been bumping up new content in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP’s) for a while.

Essentially then Google continue to strive to provide the most relevant results to it’s users, it will be interesting to see how this develops, my initial thoughts are:

• It will be interesting to see how many people actually know about the Google Profile
• It is unclear how many people provide useful info on places, products and services when they use Twitter, Facebook etc.

To find out more see: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/introducing-google-social-search-i.html

150 Zombies marched on Cheltenham Town Hall this Halloween in order to raise money for charity, the event was organised through the social networking site Facebook.

The march to raise funds for the Motor Neurone Disease Association was organised by Callie Middlemiss, Dan Cooper and Mark Burden.

Although some disruption was caused this does show the power of sites like Facebook to stir up enough interest to provoke people to take part in large offline events.

Source: http://www.thisisgloucestershire.co.uk/latestnews/Zombies-march-Cheltenham-Town-Hall/article-1471566-detail/article.html.