As search engines and search engine marketing continue to evolve, Google has announced in a blog post that it is making one of its most radical transformations ever. Following on from their introduction to Social Search, they are continuing their transformation with the rollout of their “Search Plus Your World” format, comprising three main features:- personal results, profiles in search and people & pages.

They note that Search plus Your World will become available over the next few days to people who are signed in and searching on https://www.google.com in English.

Google concludes their blog post: “We named our company after the mathematical number googol as an aspiration toward indexing the countless answers on webpages, but that’s only part of the picture. The other part is people, and that’s what Search plus Your World is all about.”

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Essentially what this means is that material from Google’s fast growing social network Google+ will become integrated into Google’s search engine results much more.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, has already criticised Facebook for creating a walled garden. Yesterday, Twitter criticised the move along similar lines:-

“For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results anytime they wanted to find something on the Internet. Often, they want to know more about world events and breaking news. Twitter has emerged as a vital source of this real-time information, with more than 100 million users sending 250 million Tweets every day on virtually every topic. As we’ve seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter; as a result, Twitter accounts and Tweets are often the most relevant results. We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users.”

As noted on the New York Times’ Bits Blog James Grimmelmann, an associate professor at New York Law School who specializes in Internet law, also criticised the move on Twitter, James stated “Today is a good day to turn off Google+ and delete your Google Profile. I just did. He continues in a telephone interview with the Times: “I don’t like it. I don’t like it for its effect on competition, and I don’t like it for what it does to people’s privacy. It breaks down a very clear conceptual divide between things that are private and things that are public online.”

Nevertheless search marketers must keep up with the latest trends. Law firm marketers should be keeping a very close eye on the changes and should at the least be experimenting with the functionality of Google+ for their firms. We have already written about our initial thoughts on Google Plus for law firms and lawyers and indeed already have a business page for Moore Legal Technology on Google Plus. I continue to develop my network on the platform and my Google Plus updates can be viewed here.

For further information on these new changes, Search Engine Land has produced a very comprehensive report on the Google changes. We would recommend anyone wanting to find out more about how the changes are going to affect their search experiences reads that.

To discuss any aspect of search marketing for law firms and other professional services firms in more detail please do contact us on 0845 620 5664.