Renegade Search

As we have mentioned before in this blog, the world of SEO is constantly evolving.  Just to prove my point, I originally started this blog post three weeks ago.  It dove into my hypothesis on the effects of social media on SEO and how Google was slowly changing the playing field.  And as soon as it was ready to publish, Google rolled out Google Search plus Your World (SPYW) and made my post, in a blink, outdated.

Social media is becoming a larger piece of the SEO puzzle.  For those of you who are unfamiliar, Google Search plus Your World incorporates personalized search results from its own social network among normal SERP results.  Depending on your search, results will now be preceded by links of your Google+ friend’s updates and photos (if you are even using Google+) that relate to your query.

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Unless you've been hiding under a rock for the last few months, you've probably heard of Google+, the search giant's new social media service. If you were interested in finding out more about the service, a logical first step would be to search Google itself for 'Google+'. As expected, the first result for that phrase is http://plus.gooogle.com, the main page for the service. But if you weren't familiar with the exact branding of the service, and typed 'Google +' (note the space) as a search, you wouldn't find that URL anywhere in the first few pages of the results. Strangely, the latter search term is actually seen by the search engine to be exactly equivalent to simply typing in 'google'; the first result is http://www.google.com.

So what is happening here? Why does adding a single space to the search term drastically alter the results that a user sees? Shouldn't Google know that what you really want is the Google+ homepage? Why is it so confused by such a small difference?

While the details are too tedious to really get into here, what ends up happening is that Google's software interprets a plus sign as an operator. In computer science, operators are shorthand ways to give very specific commands. In this particular instance, a plus sign at the end of the word is (correctly) interpreted as part of what you're looking for. But a plus sign after a space is actually translated to mean the word 'and'. So, searching for 'Google+' is interpreted at face vale, while 'Google +' is understood to mean 'Google And'. (Check out the images below to see what this means).

As it turns out, search engines actually scan every search query for special commands. And even though the special command can cause annoyance as in the example above, they can also be extremely useful, if you know how to use them. With that in mind, here are some special commands that can really help you find whatever it is you're looking for:

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We're a full month and a half into the Google+ experience, so I figured that this would probably be a good time to take a step back and look at how the new social media site has been performing. About a month ago, I wrote that Google+ could potentially have a major effect on SEO, but only if the service was able to attract a critical mass of general users. Since then, much of the talk surrounding G+ has focused on a peculiar observation: Google+ is full of dudes.

It would be silly to say that this jarring demographic disparity is going to doom the whole project, but I would not recommend investing too many resources into G+ until this starts to change pretty dramatically.

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Given the recent high-profile launch of Google+, it's clear that the biggest player in the search space is making good on their commitment to social media as a major component for search results moving forward. If the buzz across other social media sites isn't enough of a sign that Google+ is worth paying attention to, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt has gone on record stating that all Google products and services will eventually be completely integrated with Google+.

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Social media is all the rage these days, almost everyone from babies who aren't even born yet to grandparents are on Facebook, looking up reviews on local business has never been easier with Yelp, you can't walk into a party without someone using the word "tweet." Users have quickly adopted social media into their lives and now business are striving to catch up with their customers and engage with them through these channels. Foursquare is especially interesting for businesses because it reinforces customer loyalty and repeat business. However, there are a lot of caveats when it comes to social media; some business execute it seamlessly...while others leave something to be desired.

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