Search Plus Your World (Google+ and Search)

Recent Testing on SPYW and How Personalised Search is Developing

Search Plus Your World (SPYW) recap.

A normal search on Google is conducted in open search (http://) . When you are logged in to any Google product, and you conduct a search, (https:// ) this search is then conducted in a secure search mode. This secure search mode has been called Search Plus Your Wolrd. Google has also described this as a personalised search.

The personalised search results are based upon your search patterns and people within your circles. This is still being worked on by Google as the results are still very different from what their promotional clip promised.

I personally like the theory behind this, but the drawback to a search in SPYW is the results not being available in Analytics because it is conducted in a secure mode (https://).

For a business owner, SEO company or marketing company, the question is how can we gauge our websites true performance. Google does say that this can then be found within Webmaster tools, but I have yet to see the data matching to the analytics shortfall.

At the moment i have seen some “not provided” data in analytics but as Google Plus grows this will be more prevalent in Analytics results.

Search Plus Your Results

As mentioned above, results are quite different to the promotional clip, but they will eventually be as relevant and functional as the clip.

I searched for SEO, bear in mind this is a direct result of your activity on Google Plus and your Circles, so if you are a Solar Energy Supplier then your activity will increase your search visibility.

SEO searched Logged Out:

SEO searched Logged In:

The first 2 positions have remained the same, but position 3 has been replaced by a result that one of my circles posted, +1’d. Position 5 has also been replaced by one of my circles sharing the site.

The moral of this story is that as a Google Plus user you are able to influence the SPYW results, purely by creating circles within your area of business.

Recent SPYW Testing

Recent testing by Google (22 Feb 2012) has given a sneak preview on how your search results may start to look when searching on Search plus Your World (SPYW)

This was caught by +Chris Lang, when he searched his name (we all do from time to time, admit it !). He posted to Google Plus and it was very evident that this was some testing as it was not showing on google.co.uk, only on google.com.

What Google seemed to be testing was placing a block of the most recent conversation that the person had on Google Plus.

This was tested as far as we can tell for a couple of hours and we have not seen it since. If this gets rolled out we can assume that a search results would have perhaps 5 search results on very active pages. The Green Google Plus button was also live and active, so if you hovered over it you had the drop down “add to circles” option. The potential for small and large business to gain this additional exposure just by having and actively using Google Plus is phenomenal.

Google Plus is 8 months old, what will 12 months bring ?