Search, plus Your World- One more reason to move to Google+?

This morning Google announced the enhancements in the way we search. Google search will have a veneer of personalization henceforth wherein Google will factor in the social factor as well while throwing up search results. Searches from now on would be more related to ‘you’ and the people around you. The three new additions: “Personal results”, “Profiles in Search” and “People & Pages” make this change possible and form the “Search plus Your World” feature.

The news on the Google blog was posted by Google fellow, Amit Singhal and assuming him to be an Indian, he gave a very good example to explain what this feature would exactly mean. Most of us would know Chikoo the fruit. Now, as it turns out Chikoo is Amit’s favourite fruit and ‘Chikoo’ also happens to be the name of his pet dog. So, what would google throw up now when he types in ‘chikoo’?

Searching people would also be less cumbersome with the new feature. Google has been coming up with amazing products over the years and we’ve been quite happy giving our personal information. There have been outcries about privacy intrusion and Google trying to take over the world and other seemingly outlandish claims but yet, people are fairly comfortable dishing out information for the services Google provides. On the security side, Google claims that the searches will be highly secure wherein all the Google+ posts and photos will have SSL encryption. This means that the search results are as safe as Gmail.

The 'Search, plus Your World' feature would be rolled out in the coming days across the world to people who are signed in and searching over google.com. The information for this feature would majorly come from Google+, Youtube and other products from the Google stable. More activity on Google+ will probably mean more personalized results and a better search experience. No doubt this is an excellent feature but do I sense an underlying subtlety trying to shift the focus from Facebook to Google. We all know Google would love to achieve this but are we ready to give in and shift base? What do you think?

More about the feature can be found at the Google Blog.

- Jubin Mehta