The new system will perhaps make life much easier for some people, allowing them to find both privately shared content from friends and family plus material from across the web through a single search, rather than having to search twice using two different systems.

However, Search Plus Your World may cause some privacy worries, as private content may appear as if it is exposed publicly (it is not). It might also cause concern by making private content more visible to friends and family than those sharing may have initially intended.

The new format and features will also likely cause Google to come under renewed fire that it is leveraging its search engine to favor its own content and crowd out competitors.

Below, a detailed look at what’s involved with Search Plus Your World, from how it works to some of the issues it raises.

Before: Personalized & Social Search Results Separate


Now: Personal, Private, Public & Social United

With Search Plus Your World, by default, there’s a new “Personal Results” view that appears. The view personalizes the listings you get based on both your own behavior and social connections, similar to what previously happened. In addition, content that’s been shared with you through the Google+ social network now also appears.

“The social search algorithm, and the personal search algorithm, and the personalized search algorithm are actually one algorithm now, and we are merging it in a way that is very pleasant and useful,” said Amit Singhal, who oversees Google’s ranking algorithms, when I talked with him about the new features.

You’ll know that personalized results are appearing when you see one or both of the indicators below:

• Listings from the web
• Listings from the web, boosted because of your personal behavior
• Listings from the web, boosted because of your social connections
• Public Google+ posts, photos or Google Picasa photos (all of which are also listings from the web)
• Private or “Limited” Google+ posts, photos or Google Picasa photos shared with you

The last line is the most radical change, that private content will now be visible in what seems to be a search across the entire web. Here’s an example:

Slightly confusing, you can drill-down into the results to get what Google also calls “Personal Results,” which is a way to get just content from Google+ or Picasa. Remember this from above?

Why are these others missing?

“Facebook and Twitter and other services, basically, their terms of service don’t allow us to crawl them deeply and store things. Google+ is the only [network] that provides such a persistent service,” Singhal told me. “Of course, going forward, if others were willing to change, we’d look at designing things to see how it would work.”

Perhaps Search Plus Your World will prove the carrot or stick that Google’s been after for years to get Facebook to share its data with Google. If the new feature takes off, searchers may wonder why they can’t find privately shared information from their Facebook friends easily on Google.

Then again, Facebook could decide to push back by beefing up its own search features. Currently, Facebook partners with Bing, allowing Bing to personalize its search results for searchers based on what their Facebook friends like.

However, only publicly shared content gets personalized like this. Potentially, Facebook and Bing could work more closely to come up with their own version of Search Plus Your World. That could happen on Bing, or it could happen within Facebook itself.

To date, Facebook’s not spent much time trying to refine its own search results. The primary reason seems to be that the company has repeatedly said that most of the Facebook-based searches it sees are to find people, not to find information about broad topics as happens at Google.

Only You & Those You Share With See Private Content


Secure Search Protects Privacy; Referrers For Advertisers Does Not

Google’s been focused on a bigger concern. Mixing private content in with its search results means that anyone searching without a secure connection potentially exposes that private content to eavesdropping.

And now the full story about why Google rolled out secure search for signed-in users back in October can finally be told. It was necessary preparation to allow for Search Plus Your World to happen today.

“We’ve been working on it for a year, very hard to get it right,” Singhal said, of dealing with the security issues. “It’s just a hard technical problem that we bit off, and it was something that we could not launch until we had it right.”

The encryption that secure search provides means that any private material mixed in with your regular results is protected, seen only by your browser and Google, not by anyone somehow monitoring an internet connection you’re using.

Many publishers were upset about the encryption move last year because, as part of that, Google also stopped providing referrer data, information that shows what searches someone did on Google before visiting a web site.

Expect Google to point to today’s move as a further reason to justify the dropping of referrers. It’s a false justification. Indeed, the move might make things even worse, in terms of privacy, since referrer data is still being passed to advertisers.

Potentially, people are going to search for even more private things than they ever did before. Potentially, they’re going to click on ad links and pass these private search terms to advertisers.

Today’s change does nothing to change my view that Google needs to revisit the referrer blocking and either make it a block for everyone, including advertisers, or find a better way to filter search terms that get made visibile in various ways.

My post from Sunday explains this in more depth: 2011: The Year Google & Bing Took Away From SEOs & Publishers.

Opt-Out, Not Opt-In

Don’t like the idea of personalized search? Disappointingly, Google didn’t go the opt-in route. Instead, you have to deliberately opt-out.

“I think this is a much better experience, at the end of the day,” Singhal said, explaining why the default change was made.

You can opt-out permanently through the Search Settings area on Google. You can also opt-out on a per-search basis using the aforementioned toggle. Click on the globe symbol, and you’ll see unpersonalized results.

This is nice. It’s the first time since December 2009 that people have been able to easily see “normal” results, if they want them.

Personalized Is The New “Normal”

Of course, it’s a mistake to assume that doing this really shows normal results. It will eliminate personalization factors such as your web browsing history (if you provide that to Google through its toolbar in Internet Explorer), your searching history or your social connections.

But geographic targeting — which can be really significant – will still happen. So will targeting by language. Google has begun calling these contextual signals rather than personal ones. Both can be overridden, for those who want. But doing so will still produce results that are still tailored, just to a different geographical location or language.

More important, with Google heading toward 100 million users on Google+, if a good number of those are active users, then they’re logged in to Google. That means the “normal” results they see are personalized. Personalized results are normal; non-personalized are not.

Google Profiles Get Big Push

Another big change as part of today’s release is how people with Google+ accounts are going to be much more heavily highlighted in Google search.

For those logged in, they’ll begin seeing their friends appear right within the search box, like this: