Google’s awkwardly-named new results page has been stirring quite a lot of attention this past week. Rather than go in-depth explaining the change, we’ll first let one of Google’s pretty product videos do the talking:
For those that still aren’t seeing the new results page consistently (a lot of people still, according to SEOmoz’s Rand Fishkin), Google’s Matt Cutts posted this blog, talking about how he’d used the new feature.
It comes as no surprise that social is becoming more heavily a part of search, but for many (this party included), the new results appear to be making Google function much more like a social network’s proprietary search box than the type of neutral, organic search engine spidering that people have grown to love from Google. For many, Larry Page’s recent appointment as company CEO has been leaving a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths, so much in fact that popular blogger headlines in the past week have included titles such as “Google Just Killed Its Search Engine” and “Google Just Made Bing the Best Search Engine”.
All of this said, Search, Plus Your World is still a very new feature, and it’s difficult to predict where it will go for certain. Some retooling to include the other social networks without prejudice, and creating a new name while the marketing department doesn’t have the day off, could certainly be a game changer.