The page explains that Google wants to create a panel of people to help it “learn more about how everyday people use the Internet.” It explains that panel members have to be at least 13 years old, have (or sign up for) a Google account and use the Chrome web browser. They also have to be willing to let Google track their web surfing activity:

As a panelist, you’ll add a browser extension that will share with Google the sites you visit and how you use them. What we learn from you, and others like you, will help us improve Google products and services and make a better online experience for everyone.

In exchange for that, panel members get a $5 Amazon gift card code for installing the browser extension, and then can earn another $5 Amazon code for every three months that they continue in the Screenwise program. The sign-up page advertises a $25 max total payment, but the fine print says Google will decide later what payment, if any, will be given for panelists who continue longer than a year.

Amazon isn’t involved in the promotion; Google says it’s using the online research firm Knowledge Networks as its “panel management partner” for Screenwise.

The timing of this program seems odd, especially considering the backlash that Google has faced over the upcoming changes to its privacy policy. Even though this Screenwise program is completely opt-in, some critics are bound to question why Google needs more data about web searchers and the websites they visit.

We’ve reached out to Google for more information about the Screenwise panel/program and we’ll update this article if we learn more.

(tip via @centernetworks)

Postscript, February 8: Google has replied to us with this official statement about the Screenwise program:

“Like many other web and media companies, we do panel research to help better serve our users by learning more about people’s media use, on the web and elsewhere. This panel is one such small project that started near the beginning of the year. Of course, this is completely optional to join. People can choose to participate if it’s of interest (or if the gift appeals) and everyone who does participate has complete transparency and control over what Internet use is being included in the panel. People can stay on the panel as long as they’d like, or leave at any time.”

Postscript #2, February 8: It appears this isn’t the only piece of Google’s Screenwise program. As Ars Technica has learned, there’s a more extensive version of the program in which web surfers participate by installing a “high-end router” called the Screenwise Data Collector.

Ars Technica has several images of the signup process and legalese for the Screenwise program, including this shot of the data collection device.

(image via Ars Technica)

This version of Screenwise pays better: $100 on signup, plus $20 per month up to one year’s involvement.

The legalese also reveals that Google may share the data it collects with “academic institutions, advertisers, publishers and programming networks,” in addition to sharing it with Knowledge Networks, the program’s manager. Google says that “generally” its data won’t be linked to individual users, but it “may share anonymized individual-level Panelist data with academic research institutions.” It also says that “Google will attempt to remove personally identifiable information before sharing Panel Data with third parties.”

But earlier today Google said that during the game, “41 percent of Google searches in the US related to Super Bowl TV ads came from mobile devices.” While this makes logical sense — people are sitting during the game with their phones in hand or pocket — it’s striking nonetheless.

According to Google, “Super Bowl ad related searches in the US rose 200% on desktop, 970% on tablets and a whopping 2700% on smartphones.” (Emphasis added.)

Google goes on to make the hopefully semi-obvious point that TV advertisers — indeed all advertisers — now need to be conscious of the presence of smartphones in the audience and integrate mobile into their campaigns in thoughtful ways.

The problem is that many Super Bowl commercials tried to use mobile in ways that weren’t particularly effective. As 360i’s David Berkowitz pointed out this morning, QR codes on TV ads is generally a bad idea.

Related Entries

• Did Super Bowl Advertisers Take Advantage of Search Interest?
• Super Bowl 2012: What Time Does It Start?
• The Social Bowl: Grading Super Bowl XLVI Ads By Social Comments & Engagement
• Super Bowl Spike: 12,233 Tweets Per Second Is 300% Above Last Year’s Game
• Final Score: Twitter & Facebook 8 Super Bowl Mentions Each, Google+ Gets Zero
• Infographic: Google Searches & The Super Bowl

Based on underlying comScore data, the report analyzes visits to the top five websites in several verticals: Media, Retail, Travel, Auto, Finance and Health. It doesn’t discuss the impact or relative position of Facebook at all, possibly because Facebook is not yet a public company.

Mahaney points out that Google’s retention of the position of top traffic referrer is an accomplishment in a marketplace that is so “fluid” and intensely competitive.

The report has a number of key findings, which I’ve distilled here:

Google ranked as the #1 source of traffic for 23 of the top 30 Websites. “By contrast, the #2 (Yahoo!) and #3 (Microsoft) influencers accounted for 11 percent and 6 percent of traffic to the top 30 Websites.”

Google’s “influence is [very slowly] slipping”: Mahaney said that “Google has gone from delivering 17 percent of all the traffic to the top 30 Websites in 2010 and 2011 to 16 percent in 2012.” The one vertical studied in which Google’s influence has waned considerably is Heath (see chart above).

Yahoo and Microsoft’s traffic is flat: the report said that “Yahoo!’s and Microsoft’s share of traffic “has remained essentially flat from 2010 to 2012.” This is regarded as a surprise on both counts.

Mahaney said that flat traffic is positive for Yahoo given the market’s perception of the company/site as a “deteriorating asset.” By contrast this is “arguably something of a negative surprise [for Microsoft] . . . given signs of Bing Search market share gains.”

Panda In The Pipelines

There’s a mention of the Panda algorithm update that we wrote about last week, but it also includes a somewhat cryptic reference to being more integrated into Google’s “pipelines.”

We improved how Panda interacts with our indexing and ranking systems, making it more integrated into our pipelines.

Sounds like Panda is baked into things even more firmly than before, which I guess is bad news for any sites that were affected negatively over the past year.

Fresher Results

Google says it made several “minor updates” to the freshness algorithm update that happened back in November.

Date Detection

On a somewhat similar note, the update also says that Google has improved how it detects the date of a web page (document), and that means searchers should see “fresher, more timely results, particularly for pages discussing recurring events.”

Autocomplete

There are two updates related to autocomplete: Google says it’s now faster at delivering predicted queries, and the spelling corrections are now “more consistent with those used in search.”

Speaking of spelling…

Google says it’s doing a better job with “full-page replacement” — i.e., showing an entire page of results for a correctly spelled word and ignoring the searcher’s misspelled word/query. There’s also a change that Google says will help it give more accurate spelling corrections for rare queries.

News queries

Google says it’s improved how it decides when to blend news results into the search results page. The change makes Google “more responsive to realtime trends.”

That’s a quick overview of about half of the January tweaks on Google’s list. Here’s the full list on Google’s Inside Search blog.

Most Google users are happy, Singhal said. Of course, Search Plus Your World isn’t perfect, he admits, but it’ll improve. As for including content from social networks like Twitter and Facebook, Google’s open to that, as long as long-term deals can be reached that give Google faith it can build new features that will last.

I talked today with Singhal — the “Google Fellow” who oversees all of Google’s search algorithms — about the reaction to Search Plus Your World. Here’s the Q&A, questions in bold, answers from Singhal indented below them.

What’s been your overall reaction or thoughts as you’ve seen all the debate about Search Plus Your World?

The overall takeaway that I have in my mind is that people are judging a product and an overall direction that we have in the first two weeks of a launch, where we are producing a product for the long term.

We’re clearly not done. The product is not complete. It will improve, and we are going to add more things to it. We — Google — always launch products and learn from our launches.

Let me also add one thing. Here is something that I’ve been noticing. The user feedback we have been getting has been almost the other side of the reaction we’ve seen in the blogosphere. The users who have seen this in the wild are liking it, and our initial data analysis is showing the same.

With Universal Search or Google Instant, there were more initial complaints, then even later, people were delighted with it.

NOTE: Earlier this week, I was reviewing Google’s web search support forums myself. There really isn’t any massive outcry as we’ve seen with other launches, such as when Google Reader integrated Google+ sharing last year.

There are two main changes that Search Plus Your World introduced. One was the ability to search through privately-shared content along with public content. Some have written they dislike this. Your reaction?

Every time a real user is getting those results, they really are delighted. Given how personal this product is, you can only judge it based on personal experiences or by aggregate numbers you can observe through click-through.

Like everything else, we will improve the rankings and so on. But out of the gate, whereas we had limited users to train this system with, I’m actually very happy with the outcome of the personal results.

How about the concerns that Google+ is being favored too much?

Once again, the blogosphere, they’re just judging the book by the cover.

NOTE: I then mentioned there have been some examples of these blogged, such as by John Battelle, Mat Honan and just today, Tom Blue wrote about how personalized results made searches for things like “television” or “knives” seem to have irrelevant listings. Singhal then said….

I wouldn’t disagree that there may be a few examples out there where our system could be better, but there are millions of queries where our system could be better.

But specifically, there are concerns Google+ is being favored too much not in the privately-shared results but rather as suggestions in the search box or in the new People & Pages results.

This goes back to the point we have been making, that we only have access to personal content and personally shared content from Google Plus. We don’t have that access from other companies.

But what about the Don’t Be Evil tool launched this week, showing that you can create People & Pages results that do go beyond Google+ content.

This is where I’m saying most people are jumping to a conclusion based on the first two weeks of the product. We’re designing a product which it will work for all individuals. It will have identities as a fundamental ingredient of search and relationships as another fundamental ingredient of search.

All this debate is centered around these very popular people out there, and what you could have done for them, and what makes the most sense. But when you’re developing a product, you don’t want to develop it for one segment of the population.

I’ve not seen the debate that I have a [personal] friend named Ben Smith, and when I try to search for him, I get bad results. If you actually build a product only for popular people, then it undermines what we are trying to do. You can’t build a product that behaves differently for one class of people then differently for the real relationships that matter for you.

I feel like this point has not been emphasized enough. People have gotten stuck on these very popular names, and no one has been focused on the cool part of the product where you can find people you care about.

But the People & Pages section does seem focused on famous people or big companies right now.

This is the first two weeks of the product. We have designed for the future of the product. We have designed a product not just for how it works for today, and what we really want is for it to work for tomorrow. Going forward, we’d be interested in doing things like if you’re looking for a destination, we’d like to present to you people that you know who may have something to say about that destination.

People are coming to a conclusion about the product today, within the first two weeks, and they’re not fully seeing the potential where we can build this product around real identities and real relationships.

Is what we have now in People & Pages a promotion for Google+ or search results meant to be more than pushing Google+?

What we are thinking about that product is that if you’re interested in something, who are the people you are potentially related to that you should know about? If they have shared things with you, that’s the obvious thing. It’s easier to build the early system with popular people, but that’s just the beginning of the product.

But how about now? Is this more a Google+ promotional unit?

We don’t think of this as a promotional unit now. This is a place that you would find people with real identities who would be interesting for your queries.

Currently, that place I would admit is occupied by really popular people. So what we are trying to do with this product is indeed bring that aspect that there’s this real society out there that you should know about.

Why not show the additional social links there? For example, you show Britney Spears with her Google+ page in a search for “music.” She links to her Twitter and Facebook accounts from her Google+ page. Couldn’t those be listed as alternative links within People & Pages?

If people click on her Google+ page, those links are available on her About page. Once again, this is possible for us [to maybe show alternative links] because we know much more about the real identities on Google Plus. We can’t provide that for other [lesser known] people.

But what if the people I really want to know about are on those other social networks?

Now I go back to watching how people are acting [with Search Plus Your World]. For example, if someone is not active on Google+, indeed, we shouldn’t be showing their very old posts. That’s one big lesson I’ve learned from watching this in the wild. We’re learning how we can improve the product. We’re already starting to launch some of these improvements as we speak.

What do you need from companies like Twitter and Facebook to integrate them into Search Plus Your World?

Fundamentally, what we learned with our great Realtime Search product is that once you build a great product that users love, then someone else can decide the fate of that product [because when the Twitter deal wasn't renewed, the Google's Realtime Search service depended so much on Twitter that it had to be closed].

That was a very bad experience for Google’s users, and it was a bad experience for our teams. They put their heart and souls into building a great product, just to see that go to waste.

We’re very open to incorporating information from other services, but that needs to be done on terms that wouldn’t change in a short period of time and make our products vanish.

What if you got the Twitter firehose of data without needing a deal. Would that work?

The question that comes down to is under what terms all that’s under. I’m just very wary of building a product where the terms can be changed.

But what if you were given all the posts that people make, no deal needed, just full access to the firehose. Would that be enough?

There’s more to it. A good product can only be built where we understand who’s who and who is related to whom. Relationships are also important alongside content. To build a good product, we have to do all types of processing. But fundamentally, it’s not just about content. It’s about identity, relationships and content. Anything else trivializes a very hard product.

What about if you were also given a feed about identities and relationships. Who someone is, all their social connections that are made public?

We’re very open to talking to all the parties on what does it take to build a proper identity product for users, with proper relationships managed.

Wasn’t something like the Open Social Graph API supposed to provide this? Or aren’t there these type of standards already?

I wish there were such standards that were widely adopted out there. One problem we already have observed is there are all types of link spam connections on Google Plus. We have to develop sophisticated analysis, say if someone posts with a particular pattern, we can tell they aren’t a real person.

There’s a lot more. It’s not just about content. It’s about identity, and when you start talking about these things and what it takes to build this, the data needed is much more than we can publicly crawl.

Moving Forward

That’s the interview. On a personal note, I’ve viewed the debate around Search Plus Your World as perhaps an opportunity to break the stalemate that’s existed between Facebook and Google for years over sharing data, as well as resolve the loss of Twitter data that happened last year.

Both Facebook and Twitter have real reasons to fear that Google — with its own Google+ social network — might use their data in a way that would threaten their own businesses.

However, both Facebook and Twitter also have good reasons for wanting to be better included in Google’s search engine. Similarly, Google’s search engine would benefit by having more social content within it, as well as a better understanding of social relationships.

That also means I think Google’s search engine would benefit if it could socially connect with any social network, not just Google Plus. I especially want to see the Google search engine continuing to do what I’ve depended on it to do, list the best content from across the entire web, regardless of where it is located.

I covered the strange balancing act Google has to walk between its social network and its search engine at the end of my article about the Don’t Be Evil tool from Facebook and Twitter that launched this week.

As for the balancing act Facebook and Twitter face with Google, I covered more about that — and some potential solutions — in my other post from earlier this this week: A Proposal For Social Network Détente.

Please consider reading both of those articles to understand more about these issues. There’s also related background reading below.

Related: Twitter-Google Deal

• Google Launches Real Time Search Results
• As Deal With Twitter Expires, Google Realtime Search Goes Offline
• Google Realtime Search & The Aftermath Of The Google-Twitter Split
• Twitter Renews Deal With Bing; Google Deal Remains MIA

Related: Facebook-Google Data Dispute

• Facebook On Social Search: ‘We Want To Work With Everybody’
• Facebook: You’ve No Right To Export Email Addresses (Unless It’s To Yahoo & Microsoft)
• Google & Facebook: If You’re So Smart, Work It Out!
• How Facebook Enables The Google Social “Scraping” It’s Upset About
• Google To Close Social Graph API, Not OpenSocial

Related: Google’s Search Plus Your World

• Google’s Results Get More Personal With “Search Plus Your World”
• Schmidt: Google+ Not Favored, Happy To Talk Twitter & Facebook Integration
• Twitter Cries Foul Over Google “@WWE” Search, But Google Still Beats Bing
• “Don’t Be Evil” Tool — Backed By Facebook & Twitter — Shows Google’s “Search Plus Your World” Can Go Beyond Google+
• FAQ: What’s The Debate About Google’s Search Plus Your World?
• A Proposal For Social Network Détente

Searching For Santorum: A New Surprise

I did a search for santorum a few minutes ago, and this is what I got:

See the YouTube link showing up there? It helps illustrate all that I think many people are feeling is wrong with Google right now. It’s a pretty bad result, and it’s also something getting there probably because Google’s not catching some potential old-school search engine spamming.

Universal Search Picked This?

The video result is showing up as part of Google Universal Search. That’s a system that blends content from Google’s various “vertical” or specialized search engines into its regular search results. It’s only supposed to inject this type of specialized content if it’s deemed especially relevant to the search topic.

Certainly, you can imagine that there’s video content relevant to a search on “santorum” from across the web. The Daily Show and The Colbert Report alone have over ten different Santorum comedy clips that might all be relevant.

Beyond comedy, there are news reports from across the entire web. The same search at Bing gives some examples of this, of how video content from Bing Video, as well as Fox News and CNN is inserted into its own search results for “santorum,” as you can see here:

Out of 20,000 potential matches on YouTube, out of 21 million potential video matches across the web, what does Google’s supposedly sophisticated Universal Search algorithm pick out to display as the top video content to be shown within the top search results?

A cartoon created by a company pitching its SEO software on YouTube as a way for Santorum to solve his Google problem. Wow.

You Couldn’t Have Picked….

That’s the most relevant thing that Google can show? I think most people would agree it’s not. I mean seriously, it’s better than these?

• Any of the Colbert Report or Daily Show clips
• Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum arguing with a student on gay marriage
• Dan Savage explaining how his campaign against Rick Santorum ultimately caused searches on Google and Bing to show a definition as “santorum” being related to anal sex

You Couldn’t Have Caught A 65% Like Ratio?

It’s embarrassing for Google to be doing this. And it’s worse when you look at the views the video has received: only about 2,000, at this point. That’s nothing compared to some of the other clips relevant to santorum, if you’re considering views to be one possible ranking factor. How does this video get such a boost?

Well, there’s another clue when you look at the number of likes the video has received: about 1,300, at this point. That means about 65% of people who viewed the video also liked it, a ratio that is hugely out of proportion to what you normally see.

For example, the classic Honey Badger video — which is hilarious — has a like ratio of 0.5%. How about the classic Double Rainbow video? Hey, 0.5% again. The Bedroom Intruder song? A tiny bit better, 0.6%.

Either this SEO tool video is something like 130x more likeable than any of these other videos or something abnormal is happening — something that you’d think Google’s spam detection systems would have flagged.

Can I Haz My Relevancy Back?

In this particular example, the poor relevancy isn’t caused by any of the ongoing Google+ification of Google. This result is what anyone would see, even if they are logged out of Google. It’s not caused by Search Plus Your World or anything like that.

But Google has spent so much time and energy shoving Google+ into seemingly every nook and cranny that it can find that this type of relevancy screw-up feels like another bit of evidence that Google’s original core mission, delivering awesome search results, is being forgotten.

Related Articles

• Google 2.0: Google Universal Search
• Google Universal Search Expands
• How The “Focus On First” Helps Hide Google’s Relevancy Problems
• Should Rick Santorum’s “Google Problem” Be Fixed?
• Google’s “Gold Standard” Search Results Take Big Hit In New York Times Story
• How Rick Santorum Is Making His “Google Problem” Worse
• After Santorum’s Win, The Daily Show & Colbert Report Laugh Again At His Google Problem
• An Interview With A Google Search Quality Rater
• Pages With Too Many Ads “Above The Fold” Now Penalized By Google’s “Page Layout” Algorithm
• Google Announces “Megasitelinks,” Image Search Improvements & Better Byline Dates
• FAQ: What’s The Debate About Google’s Search Plus Your World?

I saw reports over the past week or so of webmasters commenting about their rankings. Most were complaining that they lost rankings, but some said sites that were originally hit by Panda regained their traffic levels pre-Panda. This would explain the data refresh, where Google ran the algorithm and updated the sites that should or should not have been touched by Panda.

Google Panda 3.2

Google said this happened about a week or so, so I would place this Google Panda 3.2 update as happening on January 18, 2012.

Why 3.2 and not 2.x? Well, I spoke with a Googler back in late November, they expressed that one of the 2.x updates we labeled as a “minor” update, should have likely been named as a major update and thus labelled a 3.0 update. I personally believe that was an October Panda update, that we did not cover here, but I do not have confirmation on that. In fact, Google does not number their updates, so it is hard to nail down.

The 3.1 update was likely the the minor update from November and now this being a basic “data refresh,” we’d label this as a minor update as well, and call this the 3.2 update.

There was a long gap between this update and the update from November because Google promised us no Panda updates during holidays.

Previous Panda Updates

Here’s the Panda update schedule so far, as we’ve tracked and had confirmed by Google:

• Panda Update 1.0: Feb. 24, 2011
• Panda Update 2.0: April 11, 2011 (about 7 week gap)
• Panda Update 2.1: May 10, 2011 (about 4 week gap)
• Panda Update 2.2: June 16, 2011 (about 5 week gap)
• Panda Update 2.3: July 23, 2011 (about 5 week gap)
• Panda Update 2.4: August 12, 2011 (about 3 week gap)
• Panda Update 2.5: September 28, 2011 (about 7 week gap)
• Panda Update 3.0 : ~October 19, 2011 (about 3 week gap)
• Panda Update 3.1 : November 18, 2011 (about 3 week gap)
• Panda Update 3.2 : ~January 18, 2012 (about 2 month gap)

We are waiting to hear back from Google on exact dates and will update our story with those dates if and when we hear back. But Google has indeed confirmed a Panda data refresh as a week or so ago.

Related Articles

• Taking a Closer Look at the Google’s Panda 2.5 “Flux”
• They’re Back! Google Issues Weather Report For Panda Update
• Google Panda 2.5: Losers Include Today Show, The Next Web; Winners Include YouTube, Fox News
• Confirmed: Google Panda 2.5 Update Arrived This Week
• Google Panda Update 2.4: Panda Goes International, In Most Languages
• Official: Google Panda 2.3 Update Is Live
• Can You Dig Out Of Your Google Panda Hole By Offloading To Subdomains?
• Why Google Panda Is More A Ranking Factor Than Algorithm Update

The new definition will take the average of the top ranking of your site for all searchers, as opposed to all URLs listed and average that. In the past, they would take all the positions of your rankings and average them together, now they are taking only the top positions.

Here is how Google explains it:

Let’s say Nick searched for [bacon] and URLs from your site appeared in positions 3, 6, and 12. Jane also searched for [bacon] and URLs from your site appeared in positions 5 and 9. Previously, we would have averaged all these positions together and shown an Average Position of 7. Going forward, we’ll only average the highest position your site appeared in for each search (3 for Nick’s search and 5 for Jane’s search), for an Average Position of 4.

Historically, this won’t impact the reports but going forward, Google will use this new calculation for determining your average position.

Google said, “we anticipate that this new method of calculation will more accurately match your expectations about how a link’s position in Google Search results should be reported.”

Here is where the average position shows up in Google Webmaster Tools:

Here is where the average position shows up in Google Analytics:

Related Stories:

• Google Analytics Webmaster Tools SEO Reports Now Available
• Google Analytics To Add Search Query Data From Webmaster Tools
• Keyword “Not Provided” By Google Spikes, Now 7-14% In Cases
• Google Webmaster Tools Search Queries Report Now Less Accurate
• Google Webmaster Tools Adds Useful Download Options

For example, a search for , returns pages on the topic of usage of comma in your writing.

Same with using a period [.]:

Alex found that they work for the following marks:

• .
• ,
• :
• ;
• #
• %
• @
• ^
• )
• ~
• |
• “

Related Stories:

• Conjunction Junction, Google No Longer Displays Stop Words Malfunction

The tool — a bookmarklet that works in your browser — changes three parts of Search Plus Your World that currently shows information only from Google Plus. These are:

• People & Pages results
• Google+ Sitelinks
• Google+ Suggestions In Autocomplete

The tool can be found on the Focus On The User web site. It was created, as the site says, by engineers at Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, who in turn consulted with other unnamed social networking companies. The “Don’t Be Evil” name of the tool comes from Google’s philosophy of wanting to focus on what’s best for users, rather than what’s best for Google.

The companies behind the tool feel Google’s hasn’t focused on what’s best for its users with Search Plus Your World. They have a good point. But the tool makes this point better than all the debates that have happened so far around Search Plus Your Word, because it shows what Google could have done to better serve searchers, if it had wanted to.

Below, how to install the tool and how it works, once you’ve done so, along with a revisiting of some of the issues it highlights.

Installing The Don’t Be Evil Bookmarklet

To get the tool, head to the site and look for the “Try a more relevant Google” button:

Clicking the button will make a new window appear, with a “don’t be evil” button that’s visible:

You click and hold on that button, then drag it to the bookmarks bar in your browser (if you don’t see your bookmarks bar, look in your browser’s options to make this visible):

Once it’s installed, you’ll see it on your on your bookmarks bar:

When you search on Google, you push that button to transform your results, as I’ll cover next. By the way, I’ve tested this with both Google Chrome and Firefox. It should also work with Safari. It doesn’t work with Internet Explorer.

Problem: “People & Pages” Powered By Google+

One of the biggest issues I’ve had with Search Plus (my shorthand name for Search Plus Your World) was the new “People and Pages on Google+” results that appear for some searches. These can show up even if you don’t have a Google+ account or are logged out of Google entirely.

These are the first search results that I’ve ever seen on Google that haven’t been inclusive of sources beyond Google, when those sources are available. To understand more about this, and how it’s such a major departure for Google, see my previous post, To Understand Google Favoritism, Think If Google+ Were YouTube.

Aside from favoring Google in a way that I’ve never seen before, I’ve felt that the results simply weren’t providing the best information to searchers at Google, especially given the prime real estate being given to them. My previous story, Real-Life Examples Of How Google’s “Search Plus” Pushes Google+ Over Relevancy, explains more about that.

The reason for the relevancy gap was simple. Google+ still lacks many important or notable people that might be on the other social networks. Indeed, until last week, Lady Gaga wasn’t on Google+ despite being one of the most followed people on Twitter and Facebook. Her absence meant she’d never have a chance at being one of the music recommendations for the People & Places results that Google was showing.

Including other social accounts in People & Pages results would, as I’ve written repeatedly, done what I expect of Google as a search engine, delivered a great search experience. From one of my past posts:

I’d love to see is Google retool the social suggestions that come up, so they aren’t simply Google+ “People & Pages” results injected into Google but more inclusive of other social sites, as well. Because that type of inclusive search product is what Google does well, and what we expect for the company to provide.

Now the engineers at Facebook, Twitter and MySpace have done what I expected Google to do, create a social suggestions search engine. Let’s see some examples.

Solution: “People & Pages” Powered By Google Search

Let’s start with a search for music. On the left, what you see from Google’s Search Plus. On the right, how things change after you click the Don’t Be Evil bookmarklet:

The first set of arrows at the top show how “People and Pages on Google+” is changed instead to “People and Pages from the Social Web.”

The second set of arrows shows how for Britney Spears, rather than her Google+ profile being shown (where she has 1.6 million followers), her Twitter account is displayed (where she has 12.6 million followers). Underneath her Twitter account, links to her MySpace, Facebook and Tumblr accounts are also shown.

The third set of arrows shows how for Snoop Dogg, rather than his Google+ profile being shown (with 1.4 million followers), his Twitter account (with 6.2 million followers) is shown. Underneath that, links to his MySpace, Facebook and Google+ accounts are displayed.

I’ll explain more about how each profile gets selected, but first, let’s do some more examples. Here’s a search for cars:

For this search, the Google+ page for Ferrari (6,500 followers) is changed to Ferrari’s Facebook page (5.6 million followers), with its YouTube page as an alternative link. Toyota’s Google+ page (180,000 followers) is also changed to the Toyota Facebook page (700,000 followers).

One of my favorite examples to show the failing of Google’s current system is a search for Facebook:

On the left, Google’s regular listings suggest Mark Zuckerberg’s Google+ profile as something people should follow. It really is Zuckerberg’s official page, with over 600,000 followers. However, Zuckerberg has never posted to it since creating that profile shortly after Google+ launched.

On the right, the Don’t Be Evil button transforms that listing into something useful, a pointer to Zuckerberg’s Facebook page (his Google+, Twitter and Quora pages are listed as alternatives.

Also notice the arrows. In this case, I was signed-in to Google+, which is why an “Add to circles” button appear next to the Google+ result. However, when the result was transformed to show a Facebook listing, I got an indication showing that I was already following Zuckerberg on Facebook (if I wasn’t, a Like button allowing me to follow him would have appeared).

One more example, this time to show that there’s more intelligence going on that just stripping out Google+ links and swapping them for any other network. Here’s a search for Google:

The first suggestion is for Google’s own page on Google+, which is changed to Google’s page on Twitter. Notice how there’s a “Follow” button next to the Twitter link, as well.

Under that is Larry Page. His listing isn’t changed. It remains pointing to his Google+ page, which makes sense. To the best of my knowledge, that’s the only place he’s active socially. While LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter accounts are also shown for him, none of those seem to be real accounts for him.

What’s The Most Relevant Social Account To Show? Ask Google!

We could debate which is the most best social account to show for each of the examples above in various ways, such as:

• Should it be based on followers? If so, in many cases, accounts on the established social networks of Twitter and Facebook would easily trump Google+ accounts, though not always.
• Should it be based on activity? Britney hasn’t posted to Google+ since January 18. Her last tweets are more recent, as of January 21. Does that count for more?
• Should it be based on engagement? Even if Britney hasn’t been on Google+ recently, perhaps her engagement with fans is better there?

Rather than try to figure all this out — and potentially come under accusations they were selecting metrics to favor their own social networks — the developers of the Don’t Be Evil bookmarklet decided to let Google itself figure out which social account was most relevant.

For example, let’s go back to how the listing for Snoop Dogg was changed:

What happens is that the bookmarklet looks at which accounts are listed initially by Google in the People & Pages section. It then does a search for the people or companies listed to find which social profiles Google itself believes are most relevant, in the first 100 results.

In the case of Snoop Dogg, the bookmarklet sees that he’s listed as a People & Pages suggestion for a search on “music.” It then conducts a search for “snoop dogg” on Google, to see which social account Google lists first for him.

As you can see above, Twitter is the first social account shown, so the bookmarklet rewrites Snoop Dogg’s suggestion to link to his Twitter account. His MySpace account is found next, so it’s listed as the first alternative. Facebook is found after that, so it’s the second alternative. Google+ is found after that, so it becomes the third alternative.

According to the tool’s FAQ page, it checks for links from any of these social networks:

• CrunchBase (weird, I wouldn’t consider this a social network)
• Github
• Google+
• Facebook
• Flickr
• Foursquare
• FriendFeed
• LinkedIn
• MySpace
• Quora
• Stack Overflow
• Tumblr
• Twitter

All the information the tool finds comes solely from Google itself, even the profile pictures, which are generated using Google’s own rich snippets testing tool, as the FAQ page explains.

Because only Google’s own information is being used, the tool can’t patch up a key weakness, which is that all the suggestions are initially based on people who are in Google Plus.

For example, you will never get Katy Perry as a music suggestion, despite her being one of the most followed musicians on Facebook or Twitter. That’s because she’s not on Google+, so she has no chance of appearing as a suggestion to music-related queries. If she doesn’t get suggested, then the tool can’t add her.

Problem: Autocomplete Profiles Only For Google+

Another feature of Search Plus that favors Google+ is within Google’s search box. As you type, the autocomplete feature of Google Instant will suggest things you should search for. For notable or prominent people, these suggestions may also include a link to their Google+ profile. For example, consider this search for Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg:

Just typing in the word “sheryl”  – when I was completely logged out of Google — was enough for it to suggest that I select her Google+ page, where Sandberg last posted in September. That’s pretty preferential treatment. Why should that be suggested over Sandberg’s personal web site or another social profile?

Solution: Expand The Choices

The Don’t Be Evil button developers call the autocomplete suggestions “typeahead” results. When you use their button, the typeahead suggestion is changed. For Sandberg, her Facebook profile is shown:

The same logic I explained above is used to do this. Whatever Google lists as the first social network for a search on Sandberg’s name, that profile is used to go into the autocomplete box (though for me, it should be her CrunchBase profile there, not her Facebook profile).

I’ve covered this in my earlier articles, but I’ll stress it again. Pointing to Google+ profiles — and no other profiles — was a significant change to favor Google+ than how Google operated in the past. Consider this:

That’s where I’m starting a search for “facebook.” I’ve only entered the “face” part and, already, Google suggests that I go directly to the Facebook home page from within the search box itself.

Google started offering these types of suggestions back in 2008 and 2009. You can still see it working today, if you disable Google Instant predictions within your search settings. Typing in Amazon, or Best Buy or New York Times brings up other examples of this.

Most people have Google Instant on, since it’s the default, so they never see these type of “old” web link suggestions. Instead, they get the new Google+ profile ones. Google didn’t have to only push these, but it chose to.

Problem: Sitelinks Only For Google+

Ever done a search and noticed a bunch of listings “indented” under the main listing? Those are called sitelinks. For listings associated with Google+ accounts, they pick up special sitelinks, their last two posts on Google Plus. Here an example for TV Guide, what someone who is logged out of Google would see:

The two arrows point to the special Google+ sitelinks that are appearing. This type of thing existed before Search Plus Your World rolled out, though I can’t recall any formal announcement of it. Certainly when Direct Connect for Google+ came out, there was nothing that highlighted these sitelinks as part of that.

In fact, the addition of them feels very odd, given how just over a year ago, Google was showing sitelinks of a different sort for other social networks. For example, here’s how a search for Twitter was suggesting people our news editor Barry Schwartz should follow:

Solution: New Social Sitelinks

The Don’t Be Evil button replaces the Google+ sitelinks similarly to how other changes are done. Here’s TV Guide again:

Rather than two Google+ sitelinks being shown, only a single one appears. In this case, it’s a link to TV Guide’s Twitter profile, since that’s the first profile that the tool finds when doing a Google search for “tv guide.” A link to TV Guide’s Facebook profile follows as an alternative.

Which Way Forward?

As I’ve explained in many articles over the past two weeks, I’ve been pretty disturbed by Google’s promotion of Google+ within its search pages.

The “People & Pages” results, if they’re intended as a promotion for Google+, still come across as if they are regular search results — results that I think Google users assume come from across the web. They do not. The come only from Google+ itself.

You could argue with better labeling, that type of promotion might work better. But that still leaves questions about why Google+ profiles are being pushed within Google’s search suggestions, rather than links to other pages from across the web. The links shown there aren’t necessarily the most relevant suggestions to be shown.

Google, in particular its executive chairman Eric Schmidt, has argued that it doesn’t have all the data it needs to include other social services in the way it does for Google Plus. The failure to reach a deal with Facebook; the failure to renew a deal with Twitter, these have prevented the social signals it needs from being used, Google has said.

The Don’t Be Evil tool demonstrates this isn’t the case, that there are social signals that Google already can find which could be used, if it wants.

Of course, if Google had done so what the Don’t Be Evil tool is doing now — incorporated links to Facebook and Twitter after they’ve rejected deals — potentially Google could have been accused of scraping content from them without permission. Indeed, that was one of the things Facebook suggested last year in what was widely seen as a smear campaign.

I put that to Facebook when I talked with the company last week about the tool. I was told Facebook saw a difference between taking public signals to build a competing social service — as it felt Google was doing — and using those signals as part of a search service that points outward.

I was also assured that if Google wanted to do the types of things that the Don’t Be Evil tool is now doing, Facebook wouldn’t complain.

We’ll see. I’ll be following up with Google. In the meantime, you can read more at the Focus On The User web site, and there’s also an overview video available:

Click here to view the embedded video.

John Battelle also has a nice write-up with his perspective here, and Techmeme has a round-up of coverage from others.

Google’s Unusual Balancing Act

It can seem confusing — even hypocritical — for services like Facebook and Twitter to not release their public data more fully to anyone (including Google) without demanding deals, then complain they don’t feel represented enough in search results.

It can also seem odd that both of those companies might favor themselves in their own social networks, not include Google+, yet demand that Google somehow be “fair” to them.

The challenge Google faces, however, is that it operates both a social network and a search engine. The Google+ social network does compete with Facebook and Twitter, and anyone would expect that it should favor itself.

The Google search engine, however, was founded on the idea that it should be fair to all. That is, after all, what a good search engine should do — provide the best results, not the results best for its parent company. The continued Google+ification of Google’s search results is bringing that fairness into question.

Potentially, that’s an anti-trust issue (and Facebook, as the dominant social service, might find itself similarly under pressure to open up to competitors). But anti-trust issues aside, it’s simply a trust issue. Will users trust that Google’s results are doing the right thing by them?

I strongly encourage anyone feeling lost in all this debate and some of the tricky issues it presents to see my post from last week, FAQ: What’s The Debate About Google’s Search Plus Your World?

Finally, you can expect we’ll be taking a close look at the huge changes that Google+ is unleashing in the search marketing space at our upcoming SMX West conference in San Jose Feb. 28-March 1, in particular during these sessions:

• Getting Personal, Part 1: How Google & Bing Personalize With Social Connections
• Getting Personal, Part 2: How Google & Bing Personalize With Search History & Geography
• SEO For Google+ & Google Search
• Ask The Search Engines – Open Q&A Forum

Be sure to see the full agenda and register soon to save the most on a ticket.

Postscript: See A Proposal For Social Network Détente for some further reflections on moving ahead from today’s events.

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