Jean-Marie Bonthous, Seamless Social
Google, Yahoo, Bing, try to balance keywords, links, and social in their search results
There was a time when, to get found online, all you had to do was stuff your blog posts with keywords. If your business was “spa maintenance” you just had to have these keywords embedded in the headers, titles and text. As bookmarking sites like Digg and Delicious grew, they became crowdsourcing vehicles to single out the posts that should rank higher. This crowdsourced pre-selections fed Google information that it used to display search results. Links were also essential to rank high: you needed the validation of people linking to your site or post. The social graph had not been invented, “Likes”, “Shares” and comments were not factored in.
Over the last year, we have seen the rise of “social” within search. The search engines now index tweets and social comments, and take them into consideration when serving you search results. Not only they like to see fresh content with the right keywords and the right amount of links coming from influential sites, but they like content that has social “legs”: content that is shared, retweeted, commented about, content which travels far, and is moved by influential people.
Bing recently managed to strike a deal with Facebook whereby it accesses your Facebook social graph and mines the 650 million Facebook accounts to inform its evaluation of online content. Bing knows how you are doing on Facebook, whereby Google does not. Each in their own way, Google, Bing, and Yahoo are trying to integrate keywords-link-and social-driven search and to give social the rising importance that it has in real-life. It’s a work in progress.
More and more people go directly to social or geolocated searches
If I type “How to Blog” in Twitter search, I get great results, and less noise than in Google. However the results can be uneven but chances are I may find some interesting content which Google may not have brought up. If I do the same in Facebook, I get whole pages of great results, with very little noise: “Learn How to Blog”, “Learn How to Blog” site, “Learn How to Increase Traffic to Your Blog” and hundreds more. Each link leads to a Facebook page. The results are also uneven, but so are they in Google. You can see that the Twitter and Facebook search engines are poised to become competition to the mainstream search engines. Add to this Foursquare and Gowalla, who are taking over the location-based business and whose search engines are building local-level expertise, and you get a picture of a slowly fragmenting search arena.
Do you want your search to be more social? connect Google to your social graph
If you do not want to spread yourself thin handling multiple searches, give Google your social network logins. Google will push into the recommended pages it serves you the results from your social graph.
We live in exciting times. Most likely, a year from now, we will see a greater presence of socal in search. Foursquare and Gowalla will have asserted themselves on the local level, and Google-Yahoo-Bing will have increased their ability to fin and serve content with a much greater social octane. That will be very useful
What is your experience with this? I would love to hear your comments.
Photo courtesy of Donna Cymek, via Flickr Creative Commons.
Jean-Marie Bonthous, PhD, is Principal of Seamless Social. He consults and speaks about social media strategy, social CRM, influence marketing, social media analytics, and how to build a social business. He has been a trusted advisor to Fortune 500 companies for more than 30 years and has led many successful, high-impact consulting projects, including change management during IT-enabled business transformation initiatives with $50-100 million budgets, balanced scorecard-driven strategy formulation and implementation initiatives, and many strategic marketing and branding projects
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