1. High level site previews in search results
2. A multimedia search within a site function
3. A social layer which, among other things, allows Volunia users to share information and connect to one another

My sense is that it is the social layer which will be most appreciated by Volunia users. Let’s look at each.

Volunia Search Result Previews Offer A “Fly-Over” Site View

During his launch presentation, (in Italian, starts at 40 minute mark) Volunia founder Massimo Marchiori described search users as similar to chickens, trapped in cages and incapable of flying.

Users have been forced to choose search results by consulting one of those classic 10 item title, summary and link lists for too long. Wouldn’t it be nice if users were freed from their cages, and not only, were actually able to fly over a site, viewing a visual or a grid map, before committing to visit it?

Volunia, perhaps from volare, to fly, offers two types of high level site map previews, potentially freeing users from commitment tyranny. The first type, a visual map, aims to group areas of a site together in neighborhoods.

Figure 1: Volunia search result site fly-over: visual map

The second site preview map is in the form of a grid, reminiscent of computer folders. The expectation is that this format will be more useful to people searching from devices with small displays, like smartphones.

Figure 2: Volunia search result site fly-over: grid map

Interactive drill-down versions of the maps are also available from a Volunia menu bar which is visible while navigating a site. Site owners can improve the maps using a Volunia provided sitemap editor.

Figure 3: Volunia sitemap editor

Result previews aren’t exactly a new concept – Ask.com introduced their binoculars feature in 2004.

Where Volunia differs is in their choice to show a site map preview instead of a page preview. Many searches are indeed navigational in nature, one reason Google provides their sitelinks for some queries.

Volunia may be on to something.

Volunia Wants To Surface Multimedia Otherwise Hidden In A Site

Initially the primary focus in Web search was on textual documents, particularly the html kind, rich in semantic structure with their glorious title, heading and paragraph tags.

Oh, I didn’t mention the links between documents, did I? Other Web content formats, from PDF files to images and then video posed much greater obstacles to search engine indexing for a number of reasons.

Today, major search engines like Google offer navigation links to enable a user to search just images or video.

Ambitious searchers can usually find an advanced search syntax page which allows them to limit their searches to specific sites and file types, but for the most part major search engines have taken the “don’t make me think” approach, providing searchers with a blend of media types in search results, what Google calls universal search.

Volunia on the other hand wants to make it easy for a user to discover the multimedia richness hidden in sites like NASA by providing a very visible multimedia site search filter.

Figure 4: Volunia's multimedia search filter

The Web Has Come Alive, Says Volunia: Volunia’s Social Layer

It isn’t immediately clear how useful this feature will prove to be: after all, even if we want to follow the “wisdom of the crowd”, there’s no way to know if the site’s current visitors from Volunia are actually happy with their choice, nor would it be clear to what extent one searcher’s expectations for a page align with those already visiting that page.

The same visitor counts are also available as layers on the site navigation maps.

Seek & Meet: Interact With Other Volunia Users

What might arguably be Volunia’s greatest innovation is in letting fellow search travelers to a page interact with each other, what Volunia calls seek and meet, a feature which feels very reminiscent of Google’s now closed Sidewiki, albeit with two key differences. The first is that users can interact in realtime.

Figure 6: Volunia seek and meet interactive site chat

This birds of a feather real time information sharing might prove useful in a number of situations where people are looking for pre- and post- purchase information.

In the pre-purchase phase, a searcher might want to interact with other users to better understand the product or service they’re considering, not to mention to discover what alternatives others are considering.

Sometimes, it’s nice just to have confirmation that we’re making the right choice. In the post-purchase phase, searchers might be able to resolve support issues by consulting with other searchers – potentially reducing a company’s support costs while providing interactive peer to peer support 24 hours a day.

Each Volunia user is able to fill in a personal profile, much like any social network. The matchmaking possibilities are clearly endless, but I suspect it would be best if I don’t go there….

It isn’t rare to see glowing online reviews written by someone with a connection to a product or service, and equally harsh reviews from competitors or ex-employees with an ax to grind. It doesn’t take much to imagine people attempting to scam the system by introducing fake search users to interact with other searchers.

It remains to be seen if “seek and meet” really is something people will take to. Real time search collaboration will well depend on a critical mass of socially oriented searchers congregating on the same sites at the same time, no easy feat for a niche search engine.

Site owners will undoubtedly be pleased with the second apparent difference to Google’s Sidewiki: commenting can be disabled if desired, something Google didn’t allow.

Volunia, The Company, And A Few Volunia Tidbits

According to data published by Italian business paper Il Sole 24 Ore, Volunia was founded in 2008 by Massimo Marchiori and entrepreneur Mariano Pireddu, with Pireddu providing €2 million in funding to date. You might not immediately recognize Massimo Marchiori’s name, yet as an academic Massimo has been working on the theoretical issues of Web search for years.

His seminal 1997 paper, The Quest for Correct Information on the Web: Hyper Search Engines, would serve as one of the sources of inspiration for two Stanford students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who would acknowledge Marchiori’s contribution to their own work, Google.

During Volunia’s beta phase, over 100,000 people are being invited to become “power user” beta testers. The Volunia user interface is in 12 languages but Marchiori said during the launch presentation that the actual index coverage isn’t limited to those languages.

The Volunia team has ideas for Volunia “extensions”, i.e. new functionality, which will be added to the core, the hard part which has already been done. Advertising will be added to the service.

Marchiori Says Social Needs To Emerge In Search

In an introductory video, Massimo notes that Volunia stems from an idea he’s harbored for several years, an idea for a “different perspective of what the search engine of the future should be”. In the Il Sole 24 Ore report Massimo said “The Web is a living place, there’s information, but there’s also people. The social dimension, already present, just needs to emerge”.

Bing, which started incorporating social signals from Facebook in 2010, and Google, which launched its social search in 2009, would probably both argue that the social dimension to search has already emerged. So would upstart blekko and to a lessor degree, the Russian Yandex.

Armani, Chianti, Ferrari… And Volunia

Volunia is based in Italy, not in Silicon Valley as one might have guessed. Italy actually has a history of search engine excellence. Google may well power most Italian portals today, but the talent behind a now defunct Italian search engine, Arianna, led Ask.com to locate its European R&D headquarters in Pisa.

The Reality Check: Search Isn’t Easy: Volunia Faces Many Challenges

The basic task of a search engine, finding, indexing and retrieving the world’s information, is a complex one. The size of the Web is immense. There’s the problem of searcher intent: we know what we’re looking for when we type a brief search query, but those few words are often open to multiple interpretations.

Google has conditioned searchers to expect lightning speed and mostly fresh and relevant results. Volunia will have to perform well on all these fronts and navigate thorny issues of privacy.

Many start-ups have nonetheless tried to compete with Google and Bing. Some, like Cuil, ran out of funding before gathering significant market share; others like blekko, with far greater funding, are still working hard to win over hearts and minds. Whether Volunia will be able to pull this off remains to be seen.

Kick The Volunia Tires Yourself!

Volunia has a sign-up form for those who want to try it out. Go kick the tires and support the underdog! From messages that I’ve seen on Friendfeed, Twitter and Facebook, very few have actually had a chance to actually use Volunia, credentials are only dribbling out, most likely in an attempt to avoid problems similar to what Google faced when they first opened Google Analytics to too many people at once. I based the considerations made (and images) in this article on demo videos released by Volunia in order to give you a preview of what to expect.

Currently these results can be seen when using the new “reputation monitoring” tool that is being released to enterprise users; a traditional search engine will not accompany this platform.

Bitly makes a case for their real-time search using “onStar” as an example as the company faced some controversy last month:

The results shown are reminiscent of Topsy, one of the leading real-time search engines. However Topsy is a true social search engine and pulls in posts and comments as well as just links:

One of the largest reasons that I believe this search platform will be valuable is the wealth of proprietary click data that Bitly has to offer. While most social search platforms simply see shares, Bitly has the power to tie in the most “frequently clicked” results as well.  Bitly also stated the following about their release:

“… instead of pagerank we’re using a different filter — for any given search query, we display the stories that we predict will get the most attention over the next 24 hours. Then we use bitly’s analytics to refine our predictions in realtime. Our search technology is based on the the most valuable measure of engagement: the click.”

Bitly will be launching this social search powered reputation management functionality for enterprise users within the next two weeks. Follow the Bitly enterprise blog for more information on the social search platform.

Intended to be a demonstration of Clever Sense’s underlying data extraction and machine learning technologies, Alfred creates a personalized “interest graph” that then serves up local recommendations for places you’ll like. But you can also search in a more conventional way.

Of course Clever Sense isn’t the first company to create a “recommendation engine” or local “discovery engine.” Currently Where and Bizzy position themselves in this way. (Where was acquired by eBay and may ultimately turn into something very different however.)

Google is also trying to use social signals to offer local recommendations in mobile.

Clever Sense’s Alfred uses a mixture of Q&A “teaching,” social signals and other techniques to construct your interest graph. I found the teaching part to be less tedious and onerous than on comparable apps. And relatively quickly it was making some pretty solid recommendations.

Clever Sense describes how the app works:

The Extraction Engine built into the Clever Sense Platform curates large amounts of unstructured crawled data by leveraging natural language processing, statistical machine learning, and data mining algorithms.

As it reads through the data, the Extraction Engine learns meaningful concepts that are descriptive of physical items in the real world. These concepts constitute the foundation of the Clever Sense Interest Graph. The engine further leverages social interactions like check-ins, likes, and ratings to enrich the Interest Graph. It calculates similarities via graph-based algorithms using these social interactions.

I spoke with CEO Babak Pahlavan several weeks ago. He gave me a demo and described Clever Sense’s “interest graph” as “Pandora for the real world.” In other words Clever Sense assigns or maps physical places to one another based on styles, characteristics and attributes in the same way that Pandora does for music. However Clever Sense is not using humans to tag or otherwise “curate” data. It’s all done by machine.

Pahlavan also explained that the interest graph is comprehensive, so the app will enable users to visit an entirely new city and get instant recommendations that are similar to places they like at home. That’s a pretty compelling use case I think.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Google said this URL will only be used to link to official Google properties, explaining it is reserved “just for Google websites.” Google explained that “you can trust that it will always take you to a Google product or service.”

Back in December 2009, Google launched a URL shortening service at goo.gl for public use. Google said that non-Google properties can be linked to using the goog.gl URL shortener but g.co is only for Google use.

TechCrunch says that single letter .co domains normall run over $1.5 million.

Related Stories:

• URL Shorteners Come To Google & Facebook
• Google URL Shortener Opened To The Public; Comparing To Bit.ly & Twitter

Now when you do a product search Google will show you local store availability — mostly at large retail chains. However, Google just said in a blog post that it’s also going to make local product availability a feature of Place Pages:

When you provide Google with local product availability data, your Google Place Page will now automatically include a new section, ‘Popular products available at this store’, featuring five popular products along with price and local availability. For shoppers unfamiliar with your business, this section shows the types of products available in your store.

Most small retailers don’t yet have their product inventories to the point where they can feed them to Google for display on local Place Pages. However this move may encourage some regional and smaller retailers to make their product data available online.

How this will play out in terms of increased visibility or SEO value is unclear. Google already displays local store availability for many product searches on Google.com.

In addition to Google other companies trying to bring local product inventory data online include:

• eBay (Milo)
• Goodzer
• LuckyLocal
• JiWire (NearbyNow)
• Krillion
• Retailigence
• Shopatron
• Wishpond

As this local product inventory data becomes more pervasive consumers will become accustomed to searching online for local store inventory information. Ultimately that will have a negative impact on e-commerce growth.

Somewhat ironically in-store mobile shopping may give e-commerce a boost, though only for a small number of trusted online retailers (e.g., Amazon) and store brands. Some savvy smartphone-enabled consumers are using stores to confirm they want product X or Y and then buying online via their phones.

In 2010 e-commerce sales accounted for 4.2 percent of total US retail sales, according to the US Census Bureau.

Is +1 (pronounced “Plus One”) part of the new social network that Google’s long been rumored to be building? Or is +1 simply that “social layer” that Google has said would come and isn’t really meant as a rival to Facebook?

Yes.

Come along — let’s see how it works now, where it might go, and we’ll get into the bigger picture stuff at the end.

+1 Your Favorite Google Search Results

Beginning today, a small percentage of Google search users on Google.com in the United States searching in English will now see a +1 button next to search listings, when they are logged in. An example of this is shown below:

Don’t see it? Don’t panic. Unlike the iPad 2, +1 buttons are in plentiful supply. Just visit Google Experimental, where you can select an option to force it to appear in your searches.

Click on the button, and it lights up all colorfully:

When you’re done, you’ve “+1′d” it, as Google says, to your social network. Arguably, it might be correct to say “+1d” rather than “+1′d” — but I’ll save the Grammar Girl ruling for another time.

You’re also given an option to undo your +1ing, and you’re reminded that you’ve shared your liking of the result publicly to your social network.

There’s that mention of your social network again! Which social network? Your +1 social network, which is different than your Google Social Search network, which is different again from your Facebook network, your Twitter network and so on.

Don’t worry. I’ll get back to all this.

+1 Results From Your Network In Search

When you do a search when logged into Google, any results that you’ve +1′d — or which have been +1′d by those in your network — will be enhanced:

In the example above, you can see how one of the results coming up in a search for “nintendo” has two names attached to it. Those are two people in the searcher’s network who have liked this particular listing, plus the searcher is told there are 16 others in their network who like it.

In addition, if a search result has gained a lot of +1s but not from people in your network, you’ll still be told the total without anyone being named. That way, you can get a sense of how popular the page might be generally with +1 users.

Improving Search Results With Recommendations

The idea makes a lot of sense. If you’re searching, it’s nice to see if there are any answers that are recommended by your friends. Indeed, it makes so much sense that Google’s already been kind of offering this already through Google Social Search for nearly two years. But now these explicit recommendations become part of that.

“The primary benefit is that search gets better. It gets better in the user interface immediately, and we’ll look at it as a potential signal to improve search quality as well. I find social search extremely useful, especially with the recent updates. This change continues the evolution of social search, and it’s a natural progression to improve the search experience,” said Matt Cutts, a Google engineer who is most known for leading Google’s search spam fighting team but who also helped launch Google Social Search in 2009.

I’ll get back to how this fits into Google Social Search further below, as well as Bing’s Facebook-powered rival to that. But for now, let’s press on with more about how the new +1 works.

+1 For AdWords

Aside from Google’s search listings, you can also favorite ads from Google AdWords that show up in search results. Just click on the +1 buttons that will now show up next to them:

As with regular search results, any +1 favoring you do will show next to those ads, if others in your social network see them. And any +1s that they do on ads will be displayed for you.

Some FAQ For Advertisers & Site Owners

At this point, I can hear some advertisers going “Whaaaaat?!” We’ll have some follow-up articles soon here on Search Engine Land that look at what advertisers think about these +1 buttons showing up next to their ads.

For its part, Google tells me that it thinks advertisers will love this, that in testing it has done, clickthrough rates on +1′d ads go up, and that the company feels it’s unlikely that people will accidentally hit the ad link (costing the advertiser money) rather than the +1 button. Some other facts from Google:

• All ads will be getting these buttons
• There’s no way for advertisers to turn them off
• Clicks on the +1 button next to ads do NOT count as a paid ad click
• Advertisers will be able to see stats about which ads are getting the most +1s

Non-advertisers feeling left out on the stat front? Hang in there. Google told me that “soon after launch,” anyone registered with Google Webmaster Central will be able to see +1 stats for their non-paid or “organic” search listings.

Coming Soon: +1 For Web Sites

So far, I’ve covered how the +1 buttons work in Google’s search results. At the moment, that’s the only place you’ll see them. But “coming soon” (Google tells me in months, rather than weeks), publishers will be able to put these buttons on their web pages.

Yes, that’s right. Soon you’ll be able to add Google +1 buttons to your collection, along with Facebook’s Like buttons and Twitter’s Tweet buttons.

Google wouldn’t say much about how +1 buttons will work on web sites. For instance, if you come to a web site while logged in at Google, will you see if others in your network have +1′d a page you’re on, in the way Facebook Like buttons work?

No answer. Google is, I was told, is more focused on how +1 integrates with search right now.

Google did say that if someone does a +1 on a web page, then that will show up to others who find that page in search results. That’s going to be a huge bribe, in my view, for getting wide adoption of these buttons on web sites.

Still can’t wait? There’s a sign-up page at Google, where you can request being notified when the button is available.

Postscript: Clearly, Google does intend to personalize content on other sites. You can see this in the sign-up box below, in the Getting Started section. But Tom Critchlow also spotted how the personalization page provides more about this:

This sounds very similar to how Facebook Instant Personalization works, for the select sites that Facebook partners with, as well as how more broadly, a Facebook Like button will draw personalized content about friends from Facebook into a third-party web site.

Getting Started With +1

Ready to start +1ing things? You’ll need a Google Profile, to start. Chances are, you have one already, though you might not have pimped it out. See our previous article below for more about that:

• Hoping To Improve People Search, Google Launches “Profile Results”

From your profile page, you’ll need to opt-in to +1:

As I said earlier, if you don’t have this option showing automatically, visit Google Experimental, where you can make it appear for you.

After you’re enrolled, you’ll be able to manage all your +1s on a special “tab” of your profile that only you can see (unless you chose to make it public):

Now Google’s redesign of profile pages earlier this month of profile pages makes sense, eh?

Your +1 Social Network…

Let’s talk about your +1 social network now. When you enable +1, it will be made up of:

• People in your Gmail & Google Talk chat list
• People in your “My Contacts” group in Google Contacts
• People you follow in Google Reader or Google Buzz

What’s missing are people you are connected to via non-Google services, such as Twitter, Flickr or Quora. That’s something that will come in the future, Google says.

Indeed, we know that there are some “hidden” options that were added to Google Profiles recently, allowing you to connect those profiles to other social networking accounts. It could be that these will be enabled soon, as part of the +1 rollout.

Your Google Social Search Network

What’s confusing, perplexing or otherwise odd is that Google already allows you to create a social network that combines contacts from Google-based services (such as Google Buzz) with your networks from third-party sites like Twitter.

Google does this as part of its Google Social Search service. This combined network used to be called your “Social Circle” on Google, back when Google Social Search launched formally in January 2010 (it was an experiment before that). That launch also provided a way to view your social circle.

You can still view your social circle here on Google, but now these are called your “social connections.” I’m not sure when the name was changed, but I suspect it was dropped fairly recently, in the wake of a rumor earlier this month that Google was about to launch a “Google Circles” social network. Google’s help page still talks about your “social circle.”

All your social connections are used to help power Google Social Search results. But only your Google-based connections, right now, will power +1 matches within Social Search. Officially, Google says this is because it wants to start conservatively with +1, ramp up slowly and make sure everything works.

Google Social Search, Now With +1 Recommendations

It was just over a month ago that Google massively overhauled Google Social Search, which is a way that Google shows things that those in your social network have created or shared that are relevant to searches you do. In fact, we had a big giant article all about it:

• Google’s Search Results Get More Social; Twitter As The New Facebook “Like”

Here’s an example of how Google Social Search works:

In that example, I did a search for “Corona del Mar bakery.” One of the pages that came up had been shared by someone I know and follow on Twitter, Amy Senk, so this was highlighted to me with a little “Amy Senk shared this on Twitter” message.

There were no buttons involved. Amy didn’t explicitly choose to recommend this page to others on her social network, via Google. Instead, Google Social Search saw she shared it through another network and used that, along with her connection to me, to highlight the page.

Now Google Social Search will gain +1 recommendations, content that people are explicitly recommending using Google’s +1 buttons. Google Social Search remains, but in addition to the first two items below, it now gains a third feature:

1. Show content created by those in your social network
2. Show content shared by those in your social network
3. Show content recommended by those in your Google +1 network

Social search signals, including the new +1 recommendations, will also continue to influence the first two things below plus power the new, third option:

1. Influence the ranking of results, causing you to see things others might not, based on your social connections
2. Influence the look of results, showing names of those in your social network who created, shared or now recommend a link
3. Influence the look of results, showing an aggregate number of +1s from all people, not just your social network, for some links

What Happens To Google Buzz?

Just over a year ago, Google launched Google Buzz, which initially looked to be Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare all wrapped into one. That is, it allowed for:

• Foursquare-like “check-ins”
• Facebook-like “newsfeed” of activity by friends
• Quick Twitter-like “updates”

None of this really took off. For example, consider that since the beginning of the year until now, according to figures from Google Buzz that I track:

• Mashable has gained about 100,000 Twitter followers versus about 100 Buzz followers
• TechCrunch has gained about 100,000 Twitter followers versus about 90 Buzz followers
• Robert Scoble has gained about 17,000 Twitter followers versus about 300 Buzz followers
• Search Engine Land has gained about 8,000 Twitter followers versus 51 Buzz followers

I wouldn’t say Buzz is dead, but it certainly isn’t buzzing. Any Foursquare-like pretensions seems to have been off-loaded onto the on-going location battle between Google Latitude, Google Hotpot, Google Places and Google Maps. Google itself isn’t sure which will win there, or even if there will be one winner.

Buzz does continue to provide a way to issue updates and get them from your network. But it clearly has nowhere near the activity of either Twitter or Facebook.

I suspect Buzz will be allowed to sit doing not much of anything, as +1 starts to build around in and perhaps replace it. Certainly one of the first things to go will be the Buzz buttons that you occasionally spot on the web.

Using +1 buttons is far more compelling. Those promise to increase your site’s visibility in Google’s incredibly popular search results, rather than in the little used Google Buzz area.

Finally, there’s giant irony. Earlier today, Google agreed to have its privacy controls audited over the next 20 years, in a settlement with the US Federal Trade Commission over privacy mistakes with the Google Buzz launch.

What About Google Me Or Emerald Sea?

Meanwhile, we’ve had rumor-after-rumor that Google is building a new social network beyond Google Buzz, one especially meant to challenge Facebook.

There was Google Me, said to be a full-blown Facebook challenger, in the middle of last year. By the end of the year, an internal product name of Emerald Sea started floating around. It was also rumored to be called +1. There was speculation that +1 would be the name of a new toolbar for the Google site — or a Chrome extension — or related to video conferencing.

Google’s standard response for about the past six months or so now has been to deny that it’s building a social network at all. Instead, the company has talked about adding social “layers” into everything at Google.

When I asked about the various past rumors, and how they relate to today’s launch, I got back a statement continuing the “layers” theme:

As we’ve already been saying, we’re committed to making the web more people-centric, and we’ve been gradually giving people new ways to share things and interact within our products. This is just another example of how we’re centering our products around the millions of people who use them every day.

Our focus is on improving our search results–to ensure we get the most relevant results to our users as quickly as possible. Relationships and recommendations are one way to help us achieve that goal–and this is what today’s announcement is all about.

Reading Between The Lines

Here’s the thing about Google’s claim that it’s not building a rival social network. When rumors started emerging about Google Checkout, Google made similar claims about how it wasn’t some type of PayPal rival. It was.

Google might have convinced itself it’s not building a social network, but +1 certainly seems to be a good start toward one. While it is beginning as a “layer” that’s part of search, those +1 buttons — when they hit the web — will put Google directly alongside Facebook in the “liking” game.

All the excitement that some had — and still have — about how Facebook’s Like buttons were going to give the company amazing insight about the web? Now Google’s on track to potentially get the same.

The New PageRank?

Google, of course, has already had more insight into the entire web than Facebook, even without having a Like button rival. That’s because despite the popularity of Facebook’s buttons, not every page on the web has Like buttons. There are tens of billions of web pages out there. The web is huge! Nor does everyone on the web push those buttons.

In contrast, Google’s toolbar data alone gives it insight into how much people “like” particular pages just by measuring time on site. It can also measure things like bounce rate from its search results to sites, and counting links to measure popularity still isn’t dead. These are just some of the tools Google has.

Still, recording explicit likes (or +1s,  or whatever) has value, especially in a time when the way Google has primarily relied on determining if a page is good — looking at links — has become very creaky. People continue buy links, spam links or not give links to sites that deserve them (Wikipedia takes, but none of its outbound links give back to deserving sites).

If links were like votes originally, then likes are also votes — but more trusted ones, especially when they are heavily used within someone’s specific social network (friends don’t generally spam friends).

In short, +1 becomes the new PageRank. OK, that’s kind of catchy, but more accurately, +1 recommendations can become an important new signal for Google to use as part of its overall ranking algorithm, during a time when it desperately needs new signals.

Calling For New Ranking Signals

By the way, the image just above was from my keynote talk at our recent SMX West search marketing conference, which covered the unprecedented changes we’re going through now, as search engines seek better ranking signals.

I’ll write up my keynote as an article in the near future, but you can watch the video of it below:

Click here to view the embedded video.

We’ll also be getting back to this topic during our SMX Advanced Seattle event on June 7 and 8, as part of our The New Periodic Table Of SEO session. So come on out (and book early if so, as tickets sold out a month prior to the event last year).

Facebook Versus Google

Beyond web page ranking, the new +1 button potentially allows Google to leverage search to build its own robust “social graph” or “view” of how people are connected to each other. Right now, Google can see some connections, such as people who tweet to each other. But +1 may allow Google to see more direct connections.

Google has been especially hobbled in that Facebook is unwilling to let people export their contacts directly to Google. Meanwhile, Google keeps saying that there’s something in Facebook’s terms and conditions that prevent it from using Facebook Connect to link to Facebook’s social data in the way that even tiny Blekko does.

That something, as best I can tell, is that Google doesn’t want Facebook to see inside its network, in the way that Facebook would like. But getting a straight answer from either company just doesn’t work. They remain at a standoff. The articles below have more about this:

• Facebook On Social Search: ‘We Want To Work With Everybody’
• Google & Facebook: If You’re So Smart, Work It Out!

+1 Won’t Kill Facebook

What’s +1 mean for Facebook? A very good chance that Facebook’s seeming monopoly on how people “like” pages will be over. Facebook’s Like buttons have a big bribe. Get liked and potentially get substantial traffic from Facebook. Speaking of which, here are some tips on that from us, below:

• How To Put The Facebook “Like” Button On A Site
• How To Optimize For Facebook’s New ‘Like’ Functionality
• How To Convert Website Visitors To Facebook Likes

Google +1 has the same compelling bribe. Get +1s, and potentially get more search traffic from Google. Expect +1 buttons to go up right alongside Facebook buttons, all over the web. But +1 is unlikely to supplant Facebook, which is far more than just putting out Like buttons.

Facebook is a compelling destination that offers many reasons for people to stay with it, perhaps the most important being that everyone seems to be there already. Plenty of your friends are there, if you want to interact that way. And going to Google is hard, because not only doesn’t Facebook let you “export” those friends, but even if it did — the friends might not want to come over.

In the end, Google seems to be making a smart play. Rather than aiming head-on at Facebook, a tough battle, Google’s using its strongest product to cherry pick one of the things it’s probably most envious about Facebook having, recommendation data.

If +1 works, it will not only improve search quality. It might make search ads more engaging,  potentially improves Google’s contextual ads and eventually may turn into a core social product that can expand in new directions.

About That Name

Earlier this month, I joked that I wanted Google to launch a “PageRank This” button for web sites. The new +1 button is kind of like that, though it has been in development well before my joke.

But seriously, +1 as a name? I’ve already seen people question how to pronounce it. Worse, how do you search for it? Some are going to search for “Plus One” and not find it, unless Google adopts that alternative spelling.

As for “+1″ itself, you literally cannot search for that on Google. Seriously. Look:

Any search term that has a + symbol in front of it is a special command that tells Google to find pages that have that exact term. So the search above for +1 actually means a search for the number 1. If you want to find +1, you have to search for ++1. But that doesn’t work — Google ignores the extra + symbol.

Over on Google News, where there are tons of stories about the new service, you also won’t find them with a +1 search:

Instead, you have to search for “google +1” — which also works for regular Google search — to finally get results:

Over time, this might sort itself out. But it does feel pretty odd for a search engine to give its new search tool an unsearchable name.

Some Social Search Perspective

Google’s move today is just the latest in a long line of ways it has “socialized” its results. I’d highly recommend reading our articles below that cover other important social developments at Google. Some of them also give some perspective on how while social is useful, it alone is not a cure for improving bad results:

• Google Social Search Launches, Gives Results From Your Trusted “Social Circle”, Oct. 2009
• Google Social Search Goes Live, Adds New Features, Jan. 2010
• In The Wake Of Bing & Facebook, Google Web Search Tests Getting More Social, Oct. 2010
• Google’s Search Results Get More Social; Twitter As The New Facebook “Like”, Feb. 2011
• You Can Hate (Block) But No Longer Love (Star) Google’s Search Results, March 2011

Meanwhile over at Bing, Facebook data has been used for months to reshape its results. It was a big leap for Bing. And yet, despite results being instantly socialized through Facebook Connect, so far there’s no indication that this feature is driving huge numbers of visitors to Bing.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad Bing got socialized, just as Google had done before it. But the nirvana of shiny high quality search results that some predicted Facebook data in particular and social data in general would bring hasn’t really arrived, I’d say. The articles below cover more about Bing’s efforts

• Bing, Now With Extra Facebook: See What Your Friends Like & People Search Results, Oct. 2010
• Blekko, Bing & How Facebook Likes Are Changing Search, Dec. 2010
• Bing Integrates Facebook Likes Further Into Its Search Results, Feb. 2011

Still, I am noticing when social results appear on both Google and Bing, an I am increasingly finding them helpful. It’s still very early days about how social data is being used. And that leads to another article with more background on this topic:

• What Social Signals Do Google & Bing Really Count?

Finally, social search is perhaps best viewed as an important part of the increasingly personalized search results that both Google and Bing are delivering. The articles below cover more about this:

• Bing Results Get Localized & Personalized
• Google’s Personalized Results: The “New Normal” That Deserves Extraordinary Attention

Postscript: See our follow-up stories:

• How To Get Google +1 Buttons For Your Website
• Google’s +1 A Potential Boon To Paid Search Marketers

The start-up company today released version two of its software, which can be accessed on the Web and via apps for iPhone, Android, and, with the new release, BlackBerry. Through a system of rewards and by encouraging social behavior, Whrrl enables people to check-in, make a list of things they want to do locally, and join affinity groups of people with similar interests.

“Our approach is grouping people together by interests, tastes and passions instead of being grouped together by explicit friending,” Jeff Holden, founder and CEO of Pelago said at the FM Signal:Austin conference. “This turns out to be very powerful.”

Once Whrrl has that information, its new recommendation engine uses it — and 25 different inputs in all — to proactively recommend “ideas,” or things to do, to its users.

“Seeing these patterns allows us to take the corpus of ideas and push them out to you,” Holden told me.

Before founding Pelago, Holden was senior vice president of consumer websites at Amazon.com, and says the concept for Whrrl partly originated from his work coming up with ways to recommend appropriate products to visitors to the e-commerce site.

It’s easy to find the one product you’re looking for on Amazon.com, he says, but what about the other 19,900,000 things you aren’t looking for — perhaps some of those would be interesting to you all the same.

This problem of helping people discover local experiences is being tackled in a variety of ways by a variety of players, including Facebook, Foursquare, Gowalla, and even a week-old start-up that debuted at Signal:Austin, Ditto.

On Whrrl, marketers can get in on the action by founding and recruiting members for Whrrl “societies,” or affinity groups. Del Monte, for example, started the “I love my dog” society for Kibbles & Bits on Whrrl, and it rewards members with a chance to win a $25 coupon to spend on their dogs. Whrrl encourages participation in societies by allowing them to attain higher rankings for providing highly-rated recommendation. Those who hold higher ranks have better chances of winning contests like Del Monte’s.

So far, participation with Whrrl is rather light. The company has 500,000 registered users, and only a quarter of those folks engage with the application in any given week. Still, Holden maintains that the quality and engagement provided via the app provides significant value to marketers. Holden cites marketer Murphy USA, which offers gasoline stations and convenience stores in the Southeast and Midwest US. The company saw “a significant lift” in purchases after it launched a promotion with Whrrl, according to Holden.

To raise the profile of the application, and to hopefully gain tech early adopters, Whrrl is conducting a promotion in conjunction with the SXSW interactive conference, which starts tomorrow. When people check in to certain SXSW events and merchants, they can win prizes including two Audis and 50 trips to Las Vegas.

In a case study released this morning the company worked with GM/Chevrolet’s ad agency to target male sports fans discussing the Chevy Super Bowl ad on Twitter. The objective was to gain additional exposure for the TV ad. The OneRiot campaign helped the commerical achieve additional reach.

Those watching the ad tweeted about it and those who saw the tweets (and the OneRiot ad) were taken to YouTube to watch the commercial and further share the ad.

Demographic targeting is possible on mobile display networks but mobile ad targeting is less mature, for obvious reasons, than it is on the PC.

The OneRiot mobile targeting doesn’t rely on any other media tie in; however this was a compelling example of mobile extending the reach and impact of a traditional media buy.

(Credit: OneRiot)

Here’s the data, showing StumbleUpon with a 43 percent share of social media referrals, while Facebook has 38 percent according to StatCounter:

Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Social Media Market Share

This may be momentary or it may hold up over time. But it’s a surprise. Webmasters, agencies/marketers and developers: are you seeing trends consistent with these data?

Google did not confirm the rumors but did reply to Kara’s press request in Google fashion:

Per usual, we don’t comment on rumor or speculation. If we did we’d be busy 24/7!

Groupon is a local deals coupon site that has grown in popularity. Clone after clone has been created trying to replicate the model. To learn more about Groupon, see our article named A Look At Social Shopping With Groupon by Michael Gray.

There were rumors of earlier that Yahoo would buy the local deals site, but Yahoo went at it alone.

For more coverage on this rumor, see Techmeme.

Postscript: See Google To Buy Groupon This Week In $5 to $6 Billion Deal?