Image by AFP/Getty Images via @daylife
"Fake it 'til you make it" is often excellent advice in life. But I'm not sure it's the best strategy for Google to follow as it goes about trying to integrate its social network, Google Plus, with its search engine. Doing so threatens to alienate not just competitors -- an outcome Google can probably live with -- but users, too.
The issue revolves around a new service the web giant just introduced called Search Plus Your World. It's an add-on to Google Search that highlights "personal results" -- pages matching your query that members of your Google Plus network have shared.
There's a lot to like about this approach. If you're wondering which hotel to stay at in Tulum, it's great to be able to Google "hotels in Tulum" and instantly see which of your friends have stayed there and posted about it.
For that to happen, though, your hypothetical friend needs to have posted about his Tulum vacation on his Google Plus profile -- or at least on a blog or another page that he then linked to his Google Plus profile.
That's the rub. Google Plus may have more than 65 million users, but for a lot of people, it's not yet where their friends are doing their real sharing. They're doing it on Facebook and Twitter. But Search Plus Your World doesn't spotlight those shares in anything like the same way it does Google Plus posts. Google says it's a simple matter of access: It has full access to its own pages but limited access to other networks' content. But plenty of critics suspect Google is using its dominant search product to give a leg up to its fledgling social product.
Facebook hasn't had much to say about this, and I doubt they will. It has no interest in helping make Google Search a better product and no inclination to share the user data it so jealously guards. Twitter, however, is unhappy. "We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone," it said in a statement. "We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users."
That's not just a self-interested complaint. The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal thinks Twitter has a point:
[F]rom the user perspective -- which Google has long been quite good at taking -- the really killer search product would transcend individual social networks. This hypothetical search product (call it G++) wouldn't rely on G+ as the social layer; it would go deeper and help people expose the implicit social networks that exist across all apps and services and searches. That's not what 'Search Plus Your World' is, though.
No, it's not. For now, it's a product that pretends that your Google Plus network is a reasonable facsimile of your real-life connections and interests. For most of us, that's just not true, and it won't be until and unless Google Plus gets much more popular. Of course, highlighting Plus pages in search is meant to help Plus become more popular. But that only works as long as what gets highlighted isn't the irrelevance of the Plus results.
As a little experiment, I used Search Plus Your World to look at my personal results for a query on the term "Aaron Rodgers." I'm a big Packers fan and so are a lot of my friends. I even have a circle in Google Plus called "Packer Dudes." But none of these friends' posts turned up in my first page of personal results for "Aaron Rodgers." Instead, I got results from Google Plus power users like Tom Rolfson, Linda Lawrey, Pete Cashmore, Tom Anderson and, yes, Robert Scoble. In fact, I only got one result from a Packer-loving real-life friend, and guess what? It was her Twitter profile.
