So apparently today is the 91th anniversary of Frank Herbert’s birth, as I saw this morning on Twitter. I went to confirm this through a Google search and immediately noticed another small change in the results: if you own a blog and have it connected to your Google profile, the search results now highlight web pages you have linked to on your blog! Coincidently, this was also my first blog post… It’s most likely another extension of Google Social Search, beyond the usual shares from Twitter and Google+. It’s certainly a powerful signal, more powerful that the number of times you visited a page, and can go much further back in time than searching links from Twitter or Facebook. Of course, data about ‘which page links to which’ was always available for Google, being part of their ranking system, but it’s nice to see it taking a more open and user-friendly form. Unfortunately it won’t be accessible to most users, because they probably won’t have bloggers as connections. 
Naturally, this also works for the blogs belonging to other people you are connected to. The example below is on Blogger as well, but theoretically this should work for any blogging platform, as long as people link their blogs with their Google profiles. The small snippet below the search result also links to the original article where Google found the link back to this search result (just click on the date), so you can get some context about why the person has linked to that particular page. 
While writing this article, I came across another update, this time related to Google+ and the authorship markup: if a search result was shared on Google+, a new snippet will show the number of comments the post received on Google+, as well as linking to that post. Not many people will get such high number of comments as Robert Scoble and quantity doesn’t say a lot about quality, so I don’t really see how this improves the relevancy of search results, but I guess the free publicity for Google’s new social network can never hurt. 
Post a Comment