Friday, 1 April 2011

Searching for your +1

Today, Google launched their very own version of the now ubiquitous “Like” and “Tweet” buttons that have become such familiar features in our socially connected world.

Google +1 is a small button that will reside next to each and every Google Search result. If you like the result, you click the +1 button and it gets shared with your social circle — and the public. The button also works on the ads that appear in Google Search. If you like those and think they can be useful to friends, you can also hit the button there to highlight them too.

A big aspect of +1 is sharing results with your social graph (Gmail, chat contacts, Reader, Buzz friends etc). More than that though, it’s about adding a huge amount of social meaning to Google’s massive search database – meaning better results for everyone.

You’ll be able to +1 any Google ad you see in results just as if it were a regular result. Of course, it’s most like the way that you can “like” any ad on Facebook as well. And at the end of day, that’s what this really all comes down to. Whether they’ll admit it or not, Google is at war with Facebook for control of the web. Facebook is coming at it from a social perspective, Google from a data perspective. But the two sides have been inching closer to one another in their competition for users and advertisers.

The key idea that Google isn’t really touting yet is that +1 data can be used to make ads social not just on Google Search result pages, but also across the whole web, so if you have a site that runs AdSense ads, it may now feature +1 data in addition to the ad.

And that makes a lot of sense to clickDM.