I think people are slightly missing the point here. This appears to be less about the google+ personal search results (searching over your friends pictures or whatever), and more about surfacing content on queries where you don't have personalized search results (e.g. that "movie" search that has hugh jackman's profile show up).
I think the idea is that if google ranks someone's twitter profile first in the organic results, why not show it in that social box? There is something of a point here.
(although for many of the example searches there are several results before any social networking results...so it would seem focusing on the user would have financial and wikipedia results for AT&T before their twitter account is listed. And then we're just back to no elevated results. But social networking is special now, I guess?)
This would be a lot more compelling if they would drop the attempt at a "grassroots" "just bringing up the issues for discussion" feel. As it is, it comes off more as that "fair search" group that was really pretty much just expedia and bing. It seems at least plausible that this actually came from some engineers hanging out, discussing this, and writing some code, and if someone had just blogged about it and put it up on github, I think it would be getting a better response (if only to prove the point). Instead, I feel like the page is just trying to manipulate me. It feels like marketing.
Comments
I think people are slightly missing the point here. This appears to be less about the google+ personal search results (searching over your friends pictures or whatever), and more about surfacing content on queries where you don't have personalized search results (e.g. that "movie" search that has hugh jackman's profile show up).
I think the idea is that if google ranks someone's twitter profile first in the organic results, why not show it in that social box? There is something of a point here.
(although for many of the example searches there are several results before any social networking results...so it would seem focusing on the user would have financial and wikipedia results for AT&T before their twitter account is listed. And then we're just back to no elevated results. But social networking is special now, I guess?)
This would be a lot more compelling if they would drop the attempt at a "grassroots" "just bringing up the issues for discussion" feel. As it is, it comes off more as that "fair search" group that was really pretty much just expedia and bing. It seems at least plausible that this actually came from some engineers hanging out, discussing this, and writing some code, and if someone had just blogged about it and put it up on github, I think it would be getting a better response (if only to prove the point). Instead, I feel like the page is just trying to manipulate me. It feels like marketing.