There’s been a lot of talk in the past 24 hours about how Google may be favouring its own social network Google+ with yesterday’s “Search plus Your World” update. Getting lost in this heated discussion is the simple question of whether this update actually improves the search experience on Google.
Google, in its announcement yesterday, said that it is “transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships.” After testing the update, though, it feels like Google doesn’t quite understand the “people and relationships” part well enough yet to make it such an important factor in its flagship product.
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To test the update, I decided that instead of just doing artificial searches for the sake of it, I would just go back to my search history and retry a day’s worth of searches from last week and compare the personalised and regular results side by side.
Too Much Clutter, Too Many Irrelevant Results
Here is my general impression: for the majority of my searches, the personalisation didn’t really matter, as my online friends never said anything relevant about those queries. Switching between those results and the non-personalized ones yielded virtually the same links.
When the personalisation did kick in, though, the search results were now too cluttered with often irrelevant status updates and other digital flotsam. Indeed, as I went through my list, I often found myself wishing that my Google+ friends had nothing to say about that topic.
The Google+ posts that appear in the results are often not really relevant to the search query. They also often include comments (and all those little avatars that go with them), which generally add very little to your search experience.
The Google+ follow suggestions in the sidebar often include people you already follow and this feature just feels like Google is trying to push Google+ a little bit too hard.
Every Google Search is Now an Ego Search
When I search on Google, I want to see new information, not what I did last weekend. The new algorithm puts too much emphasis on content you created yourself – and especially posts on Google+, of course. When I do a Google search, I’m not usually looking for my own stuff and I don’t need to see my own photos, blog posts or status updates clutter up my search results. Maybe Google could move this into the sidebar, but that wouldn’t help its clutter problem either, of course.
Be Careful Who You Friend
Unless you are very careful about who you friend on Google+, the relevance of Google’s new “personal results” can also quickly go down the drain. When we friend people online, we don’t do so to improve our search results.
Here is what it comes down to: The fact that we are somebody’s “friend” online doesn’t necessarily mean that we have common tastes. While there is a high probability that we have something in common that made us connect online in the first place, chances are that this only represents a very small part of our interests and we may only share very little else in common with these people. Until Google – and all the other search engines for that matter, too – are able to understand more of the nuances of our online relationships, social search efforts like personal search will inevitably remain limited and frustrating.
If you want to opt out of the new “personal results,” just look for the opt-out toggle here.
