Serious question: why would you want to share it? I think the default for most websites is already that no one goes there. Telling someone "This exists but don't go there" is like the canonical, "Don't think of a polar bear."
On the other hand, telling Google "you know this exists but it's useless" is a useful bit of information. It's not like your blocked websites would be shared in a list, they would just be used to influence the ordering of search results.
well that's more of a middle finger for a domain or subdomain as opposed to a thumbs down for a single result for a specific search (which is how I envision a -1)
If I could see this -1 layer and +1 layer in social searches I could pick out visually what the more likely to have solid content links would be. Or the safer-neighborhoods if you will.
I always thought a few recommendations or disses by people in my social network weighed as heavily as a couple hundred recommendations in aggregate of total strangers (like yelp).
I got a few downvotes last week saying google needed exactly this to fend off Facebook constructing a search engine based on it's like button data.
This goes a long way but the problem I see here is that I want to be able to +1 on the page itself, not have to click back to the search results, find the result again, and then press +1.
"And soon you'll be able to +1 more than just search results. You'll also find the +1 button on sites across the web, making it easy to +1 pages after you visited them."
But isn't this the classic problem regarding the dinosaur and the egg ?!
I would have made sure that those embeddable buttons (some basic rudimentary version) are out along with the roll out. Because, I know literally no-one who goes back to the search results page for anything !
They do seem to be adding a little too much to the search engine itself. I just noticed that they've finally hidden "realtime results" behind a link you have to click, instead of shoving random idiotic Twitter crap in your face when you search for current topics.
There's an idea that had some potential, but seems to have made no progress since its debut. It's still no better than a simple Twitter search.
Google seems a little too eager to adopt random crazy ideas (SearchWiki) and a little too willing to kill off good ideas that don't take off quickly enough (Wave). I can't think of a recent new feature or product that was a big success, which is disappointing.
I thought Wave was a good idea, and a good amount of my friends used it for a while. I think integrating it more with gmail would have made it dynamite. Or some how using it as a regular email account. I kinda miss wave now.
The obvious: I'm sure it won't be long before Google creates an embeddable +1 button, for you to include in your site/blog/webapp. Because right now I don't see why I would run a search, click the result, go 'whoah, good article' and then hit back to the results page to '+1' aforementioned article.
What I really like about this, though, is that it sounds so good.
"It's a little bit nerdy," is exactly the problem I see with this. They are taking a piece of internet/geek culture and expanding it to my Grandma. My Grandma know what it means to "Like" something, but does she understand "+1"? Probably not.
Well to be fair, Andrex, people still don't know what a 'googol' is. They know 'Google', and what 'Google' means to them is very different from 'googol'.
It's an interesting way of arranging a link aggregator, in that the links are already present. That said, I don't see this taking off. People compartmentalize their life based on functionality. Some will see google only as a search tool, digg/reddit/hn/slashdot/etc as their social news site, gmail/hotmail/etc as their mailing client - and wont use those products for anything other than their mentally compartmentalized purpose.
The other issue that I see here is the culture that is present. Think of everyone that uses google - do you want all of their votes to influence the content that you see? I don't want to see the eggplant tofurduken recipe that Aunt Millie +1'd. Sure, you can limit the influence to just your circle of friends, but that doesn't bring much new to the table. Reddit has done well because it allows for this context of culture to be one of it's primary features (via subreddits). Even HN has this driving niche focus sitewide.
All that said, while I dont expect this to take off, I do expect to see a "+1 THIS!" button next to the "tweet this!"/"digg this!"/"reddit this!" button on every blogspam post out there.
If this will be the final product of "+1", I'd agree with you that it probably won't take off.
Google, however, has been taking it methodically slow on social (and geo-location too). This is probably just a small piece of what they envision it to be. This is in contrast to the big, complicated launch of Google Wave.
I'm holding my judgement for now. I'm excited to see what Google comes up with next.
Perhaps a better comparison would be Buzz. That was a big change, rolled out to everyone at once, and an attempt at grabbing a chunk of the social web in one swoop.
Meanwhile, their repeated, incremental, segmented, non-intrusive changes to add social aspects to their searching have essentially all gone off without a hitch.
The first time I saw Buzz, I thought "Really? Good luck with that.". Prior to the privacy hubbub (I actually read the dialog), which nigh-totally tanked it. The first time I saw a tweet from a friend come up in a relevant search result, I thought "Really? Awesome." and I clicked on the link. I think this'll end up working better than their much-ignored stars on results.
Yeah, people are underestimating (and have been for a while) how useful social search is, and +1 is really just an extension of that. Although that may be because you need a Google Profile and have it linked to all your profiles to get the most use out of it.
Google had what people had been linking to on Twitter, but they didn't have what they had "liked" on Facebook. Now they have an answer to that too.
> All that said, while I dont expect this to take off, I do expect to see a "+1 THIS!" button next to the "tweet this!"/"digg this!"/"reddit this!" button on every blogspam post out there.
Agreeing with you here, not to mention I would typically +1 something after clicking on the link and reading it. This current UX has me either knowing something is worthy of a +1 before reading it or reading it, pressing the back button, then clicking the +1. A +1 THIS next to tweet/digg/like makes sense.
I agree 1000% that people compartmentalize based on functionality, which is why Google shouldn't be afraid of Facebook on search (that and Facebook not having search and search being difficult).
What if I'm facebook and I'm processing >500M "likes" a day?
Could I create a reasonable search engine only using URLs people have "liked" and weight search results based on number of likes and whether people in my friends list have liked it?
You could, but I doubt many would use it. I agree with the above, that people compartmentalize, and they see Facebook as a place to see pictures of their friends and play games. They see Google as place to look up information.
There already is a very good search on Facebook and the fact that it is powered by Bing is unknown and irrelevant to 95% of the people. However it hasn't made a dent in search, so you have to seriously ask why that is. If you believe in Facebook as a search engine (I don't), the only real answer is because it's not powered by Likes. But to believe that, you have to believe that people have a major affinity for Likes, enough to throw away their old search habits in favor of it.
That'll work great if you're searching for the latest hamster-on-a-piano video. It might not work quite so well if you're searching for something with substance. Despite the hype, most people aren't especially good at uncovering original content.
I think that sharing that sort of thing will be in a more targeted way, via e.g. yourpane.com. I never share links that don't appeal to everyone on Twitter or Facebook, but I send things to specific friends all the time.
I would see the fact that the walled Facebook encompasses more and more of previously searchable content as a bigger threat to Google search. Facebook that cannot be scraped for content competes for the pageviews share with the independent searchable sites, so there's less left for Google to search.
Beautifully said, especially about Aunt Millie. Limiting the influence to your contacts should be the default setting. If some people are more adventurous, then they can jump in.
> I don't want to see the eggplant tofurduken recipe that Aunt Millie +1'd.
I agree with you mostly, but I think you're slightly missing the point in this bit. Suppose you had searched for "eggplant tofurduken recipe" and the result that Aunt Millie +1'd happened to be shown - would you appreciate knowing that she had looked at the same page and approved it? I know I would.
I think people are reading a bit too much into this as if it's now going to have a huge influence on Google's search results, taking precedence over the actual search terms. I think it's actually going to be far more incremental than that.
would you appreciate knowing that she had looked at the same page and approved it? I know I would
Why? For a topic like that, I'd trust Google's general algorithm better than any friend or relative.
And even if recommendations can improve the results, why would the recommendations of my friends be any better than those of strangers? There are a few things like music where I might care what a few particular friends think, but I wouldn't be using Google to discover things like that anyway. The only time I want to see links from my friends is when I'm taking a break and not looking for anything in particular.
If Google actually wants to become a discovery/recommendation engine, it's going to be orthogonal to search. They will have to train people to use Google in a new way -- the way they currently use Facebook. This idea that goal-seeking and passive entertainment can be merged into a single activity seems really unnatural to me.
If more people link to the better recipes, then yes. If not, recommendations might help but again, why is my aunt's choice more accurate than a stranger's?
Carrying on with the recipe example, there are dozens of ways to cook most recipes, which do you choose? How the variations differ may not be immediately obvious, however if you have extra information, such as your aunt's recommendation then the choice may become easier (your aunt shares your taste in cakes for example).
Social recommendation is useful when there are lots of right answers.
I'm supposed to like the same food as my friends and relatives? That's absurd. My father loves olives, I hate them. My brother hates spicy food, I love it. My mother hates cheese and milk, I like them just fine. My extended family is all meat and potatos, I'll eat food from anywhere in the world.
The things that connect me to these people just has nothing whatsoever to do with the things that I search for. I'm having a hard time thinking of any topic on which my friends and relatives can make better recommendations than the entire internet just by virtue of knowing me. The only time I would want to constrain a search to my social network is when I'm researching my social network itself.
I'm not surprised that people like the idea of social search. It sounds pleasant enough. But I have yet to see any useful example of it, or even hear a hypothetical one.
You're getting a little personal with the recipe example, I am sure there are people out there who like to cook and have family members who like to cook the same things. Crazy I know.
I suppose you could have no shared interests and opinions with anyone you know. Then I am afraid social recommendation, whether it is verbal or as part of a Google search, isn't for you.
I shall say it again for you, there are many questions where there are no wrong answers for which adding a social context will be a benefit, especially if you are someone who is in contact with people who have opinions you care about.
I frankly agree.. except that I think this might be a bit of geek-goggles. I think most of the people I know would love social proof from their immediate circle...
But yeah. Not me, man. The internets are my friends.
To a large extent tastes are regional and based on cultural background. Particularly in the case of acquired tastes such as for spicy or astringent food, there's a clear in-group/out-group bimodal distribution of preference.
Obviously individual variations exist, but the opinions of your friends and family are far from being irrelevant data.
To jumpstart user identities in googles take on social google could buy communities like github, photo.net and import user identities from there. Of course the privacy and the UX of such a move will dictate whether users go "wow this is great" or "oh my god now the whole internet knows about my tinfoil hat". In the meanwhile they could try to integrate identities from services that google already owns - youtube, picasa, google reader etc.
This might sound dumb, but it's not really obvious how I add people I know to my google profile as a "friend". With facebook, it's dead simple and it makes sense why you would do that.
The searchengineland article explains it: http://searchengineland.com/meet-1-googles-answer-to-the-fac...
As far as I understand, things from connected accounts is the social connection. The friends are your buzz friends (I think, please correct me if I'm wrong).
It can have a nerdy connotation, but +1 is pretty well known. The average person probably sees it in the party invite/club culture context where you vouch for one person, much like you'll be vouching for sites.
Probably not better than Like, but definitely not worse than Tweet.
To me, it's much closer to communicating agreement in Apache open source projects. Someone proposes an idea or expresses an opinion, others simply respond with "+1" instead of a variety of ways of saying "Yes/agreed/I concur/indeed/I second/I support/Let's do it" etc.
So I got the same thought that pathik did - the +1 feeds my personal image of Google as primarily run by engineers.
But the context of this is much more akin to forums than parties. I'll +1 a link I agree with or found useful, but I'm not going to bring the link to a night club.
Maybe ++ would be engineer-ish, but I think that "+1" gives a better connotation of contributing to a greater social whole rather than seeming like just another bookmarked page.
I'll agree that 'Like' is more natural than +1, but 'Tweet'?!?
Not only does 'Tweet' not have the natural connotation of 'Like' or '+1', but it sounds positively dorky to say.
But of course 'Tweeting' is incredibly popular, which I guess just goes to show that sometimes it's better to use a weird word that initially sounds like nonsense. :-)
4chan already regularly troll google search results by mass-searching for a specific, disturbing sentence. This seems like another tool in their arsenal.
Not saying Google should let bullies dictate their behaviour, but this _could_ be abused.
The TechCrunch article hinted at this feature being rolled out to everyone performing a search on Google, so this sort of thing may very well affect us all.
I imagine Google will manage some sort of defense, though. This feature could kill their product otherwise.
I don't find this very useful. My friends often like things that I don't like. They're not my friends because they like the bands or movies or web sites that I do. Recommendations from my friends carry no more weight than they would from anyone else.
The only difference between a friend and a stranger is that I might engage a friend in a conversation with specific questions about something they've used or seen that I haven't, but the value of that conversation comes from the detail of the exchange and targeted or objective questions I'd ask, it's not expressible as a boolean like/+1 or a 1-10 rating.
Isn't that the point? If one day you search something that is outside your current interests, but within one of your friends, you'd see they gave it a +1, and you'd have a personal connection to reference.
Is the techcrunch article more interesting than Google's own announcement? I personally don't find their coverage to be very insightful. (except for the occasional Mark Suster guest post)
Makes me wonder if jacques' blog may not be the only one targeted by HN auto-posting bots.
It would have been so cool if I could have redirected ads to a particular friend. E.g, I know he's looking for a camera, and I see this great deal when looking up some reviews for him.
114 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 75.9 ms ] threadIf I could see this -1 layer and +1 layer in social searches I could pick out visually what the more likely to have solid content links would be. Or the safer-neighborhoods if you will.
I always thought a few recommendations or disses by people in my social network weighed as heavily as a couple hundred recommendations in aggregate of total strangers (like yelp).
This goes a long way but the problem I see here is that I want to be able to +1 on the page itself, not have to click back to the search results, find the result again, and then press +1.
"And soon you'll be able to +1 more than just search results. You'll also find the +1 button on sites across the web, making it easy to +1 pages after you visited them."
I would have made sure that those embeddable buttons (some basic rudimentary version) are out along with the roll out. Because, I know literally no-one who goes back to the search results page for anything !
http://web.archive.org/web/19961017235908/http://www2.yahoo....
And then in 2006:
http://web.archive.org/web/20060101035628/http://www.yahoo.c...
? Google has featuritis.
There's an idea that had some potential, but seems to have made no progress since its debut. It's still no better than a simple Twitter search.
Google seems a little too eager to adopt random crazy ideas (SearchWiki) and a little too willing to kill off good ideas that don't take off quickly enough (Wave). I can't think of a recent new feature or product that was a big success, which is disappointing.
Google Chrome?
Search Engine Land does a good job of relating this announcement to prior Google social projects and rumors: http://searchengineland.com/meet-1-googles-answer-to-the-fac...
You can join Google's +1 experiment here: http://www.google.com/experimental/
Lets see how well they do with it.
What I really like about this, though, is that it sounds so good.
"I'd +1 that."
"Have you +1ed?"
"Where's the essay? Uh, it's in my +1s"
I agree with the branding of it. I doubt I will use it much, but it is catchy.
The other issue that I see here is the culture that is present. Think of everyone that uses google - do you want all of their votes to influence the content that you see? I don't want to see the eggplant tofurduken recipe that Aunt Millie +1'd. Sure, you can limit the influence to just your circle of friends, but that doesn't bring much new to the table. Reddit has done well because it allows for this context of culture to be one of it's primary features (via subreddits). Even HN has this driving niche focus sitewide.
All that said, while I dont expect this to take off, I do expect to see a "+1 THIS!" button next to the "tweet this!"/"digg this!"/"reddit this!" button on every blogspam post out there.
Google, however, has been taking it methodically slow on social (and geo-location too). This is probably just a small piece of what they envision it to be. This is in contrast to the big, complicated launch of Google Wave.
I'm holding my judgement for now. I'm excited to see what Google comes up with next.
Meanwhile, their repeated, incremental, segmented, non-intrusive changes to add social aspects to their searching have essentially all gone off without a hitch.
The first time I saw Buzz, I thought "Really? Good luck with that.". Prior to the privacy hubbub (I actually read the dialog), which nigh-totally tanked it. The first time I saw a tweet from a friend come up in a relevant search result, I thought "Really? Awesome." and I clicked on the link. I think this'll end up working better than their much-ignored stars on results.
Google had what people had been linking to on Twitter, but they didn't have what they had "liked" on Facebook. Now they have an answer to that too.
Agreeing with you here, not to mention I would typically +1 something after clicking on the link and reading it. This current UX has me either knowing something is worthy of a +1 before reading it or reading it, pressing the back button, then clicking the +1. A +1 THIS next to tweet/digg/like makes sense.
Could I create a reasonable search engine only using URLs people have "liked" and weight search results based on number of likes and whether people in my friends list have liked it?
There already is a very good search on Facebook and the fact that it is powered by Bing is unknown and irrelevant to 95% of the people. However it hasn't made a dent in search, so you have to seriously ask why that is. If you believe in Facebook as a search engine (I don't), the only real answer is because it's not powered by Likes. But to believe that, you have to believe that people have a major affinity for Likes, enough to throw away their old search habits in favor of it.
A web for the rest of us!
I agree with you mostly, but I think you're slightly missing the point in this bit. Suppose you had searched for "eggplant tofurduken recipe" and the result that Aunt Millie +1'd happened to be shown - would you appreciate knowing that she had looked at the same page and approved it? I know I would.
I think people are reading a bit too much into this as if it's now going to have a huge influence on Google's search results, taking precedence over the actual search terms. I think it's actually going to be far more incremental than that.
Why? For a topic like that, I'd trust Google's general algorithm better than any friend or relative.
And even if recommendations can improve the results, why would the recommendations of my friends be any better than those of strangers? There are a few things like music where I might care what a few particular friends think, but I wouldn't be using Google to discover things like that anyway. The only time I want to see links from my friends is when I'm taking a break and not looking for anything in particular.
If Google actually wants to become a discovery/recommendation engine, it's going to be orthogonal to search. They will have to train people to use Google in a new way -- the way they currently use Facebook. This idea that goal-seeking and passive entertainment can be merged into a single activity seems really unnatural to me.
Google has an algorithm that effectively ranks the quality of recipes?! Neat!
Social recommendation is useful when there are lots of right answers.
The things that connect me to these people just has nothing whatsoever to do with the things that I search for. I'm having a hard time thinking of any topic on which my friends and relatives can make better recommendations than the entire internet just by virtue of knowing me. The only time I would want to constrain a search to my social network is when I'm researching my social network itself.
I'm not surprised that people like the idea of social search. It sounds pleasant enough. But I have yet to see any useful example of it, or even hear a hypothetical one.
I suppose you could have no shared interests and opinions with anyone you know. Then I am afraid social recommendation, whether it is verbal or as part of a Google search, isn't for you.
I shall say it again for you, there are many questions where there are no wrong answers for which adding a social context will be a benefit, especially if you are someone who is in contact with people who have opinions you care about.
But yeah. Not me, man. The internets are my friends.
Obviously individual variations exist, but the opinions of your friends and family are far from being irrelevant data.
Maybe you could pretend it's a microtransaction gift to the receiver, which it probably is in some vague way.
I assume I have to connect an account here: https://profiles.google.com/connectedaccounts
But then don't my friends have to do that as well? I don't really see why they would.
I, for one, prefer it to 'Like' or 'Tweet'.
Probably not better than Like, but definitely not worse than Tweet.
Edit: And the ultimate arbitrator of slang agrees: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=plus%20one
I've never heard anybody say they 'like' an article from Wikipedia, but they might find it interesting, so they'd +1 it.
So it is more generally useful. One could +1 a news article about an earthquake or horrific disaster, but might be reluctant to Like it.
So I got the same thought that pathik did - the +1 feeds my personal image of Google as primarily run by engineers.
Not only does 'Tweet' not have the natural connotation of 'Like' or '+1', but it sounds positively dorky to say.
But of course 'Tweeting' is incredibly popular, which I guess just goes to show that sometimes it's better to use a weird word that initially sounds like nonsense. :-)
Hopefully this is just a very small part of their larger plan.
Not saying Google should let bullies dictate their behaviour, but this _could_ be abused.
The value to the SEO underworld depends on how Google interprets the +1.
Google can use +1 data to identify folks trying to game the system.
The easiest way to get around said identification, or rather, to keep Google from using your +1 to hose you, is to provide good data.
Since Google wants good data .....
I imagine Google will manage some sort of defense, though. This feature could kill their product otherwise.
The only difference between a friend and a stranger is that I might engage a friend in a conversation with specific questions about something they've used or seen that I haven't, but the value of that conversation comes from the detail of the exchange and targeted or objective questions I'd ask, it's not expressible as a boolean like/+1 or a 1-10 rating.
Makes me wonder if jacques' blog may not be the only one targeted by HN auto-posting bots.
(-1 the mouseover animated highlight glossy thing though.)
Confusing broken URL cracking code everywhere. ;)
+1 -> Bob's a happy monkey !
I love Google but I hated Buzz and I think I will hate social search too.