Original Article: Ian Lurie at Conversion Marketing claims to have seen Twitter results appearing in Google search results in “Search Plus Your World” fashion.

He shows a screen cap to back up his claim. It’s not the People and Places box or anything, but it does appear to show a social search result from Twitter, very similar to the recent injection of personalized Google+ connection results.

I’m not sure this is the result of any new offering from Google. They’ve had such social search features long before SPYW. See the “Social Connections and Content” section of your Google dashboard. This is basically the same connections you have listed on your Google Profile. So if you have your Twitter account connected, Google has that information, and can deliver you such results.

It’s not exactly the same as having access to the Firehose, which would blast all tweets into Google’s index in real time.

That said, SPYW has pretty much dominated those personalized search results with Google+ connections since it was announced, though Google made it clear, that it does in fact draw from other open web sources.

Still, Twitter raised a big stink about the whole thing, claiming Google was making Twitter results less visible. Many criticized the lack of non-Google sources in the People and Pages box in particular.

There have been reports of the relationship between Google and Twitter souring. Apparently the companies were supposed to have an Android-related conversation at the Consumer Electronics Show last month, but that didn’t happen, as Google’s SPYW raised the aforementioned stink.

It’s really not clear if this finding from Lurie is the result of any new developments. My guess is not. We’ve reached out to Google for comment, and will update accordingly.

Either way, it does show that Google will still show personalized Twitter results in some cases. That said, given Google’s increased emphasis on freshness, that firehose would be a lot more helpful.

It’s interesting how relevant this conversation still is over a year later. That article was about half a year before Google launched Google+, and there was a lot of uncertainty about what Google might do in social. The company had not had a lot of luck in that area with previous products, and there was a lot of skepticism about whether Google could ever truly succeed in social.

Sure, there is still some skepticism, but I think Google+ has surprised a lot of people by how successful it’s become already. It’s growing like a weed, but Google’s strategy of integrating it with other Google products is much more aggressive than any of the company’s past social strategies.

Now, it’s heavily integrated with Google’s main product – search. This is the one Google product that it is probably safe to say that MOST PEOPLE use. That bodes well for future growth of Google+ (as long as regulators don’t put an end to it).

To reiterate a point I made in that old article, Facebook has the strongest collection of person-to-person interactions on the entire web. That was true then, and it is still true. The only difference is that Facebook has several hundred million more users than it did back then, so this case is all the stronger now.

John Battelle (who wrote the book “The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture”, mind you) has brought the whole Facebook as a search engine discussion back to the forefront, in light of Google’s recent addition of Google+ integration into search results, and he makes some pretty good points.

“Both Facebook and the app economy are invisible to Google’s crawlers,” he writes. “To be fair, there are billions of Facebook pages in Google’s index, but it’s near impossible to ‘organize them and make them universally available’ without Facebook’s secret sauce (its social graph and related logged in data). This is what those 2009 negotiations broke down over, after all.”

“The app economy, on the other hand, is just plain invisible to anyone,” he continues. “Sure, you can go to one of ten or so app stores and search for apps to use, but you sure can’t search apps the way you search, say, a web site. Why? First, the use case of apps, for the most part, is entirely personal, so apps have not been built to be ‘searchable.’ I find this extremely frustrating, because why wouldn’t I want to ‘Google’ the hundreds of rides and runs I’ve logged on my GPS app, as one example?”

“Secondly, the app economy is invisible to Google because data use policies of the dominant app universe – Apple – make it nearly impossible to create a navigable link economy between apps, so developers simply don’t do it,” adds Battelle. “And as we all know, without a navigable link economy, ‘traditional’ search breaks down.”

Of course Google has a pretty extensive app universe with the Android Market, fragmented as it may be. There’s also the Chrome app ecosystem and the Google+ ecosystem, which already has games.

While I’m not exactly in the “the web is dead because of apps” crowd, I can certainly acknowledge the fact that people are using apps a lot these days to interact with the Internet. I don’t think Google’s version of the searchable, open web, will become obsolete anytime soon, but there’s room for competition via a different breed of search in the way that Battelle’s talking about. With or without the help of Bing, Facebook could seize the tremendous opportunity it has here.

“Imagine a world where the majority of app builders integrate with Facebook’s Open Graph, instrumenting your personal data through Facebook such that your data becomes searchable. (If you think that’s crazy, remember how most major companies and app services have already fallen all over themselves to leverage Open Graph),” says Battelle. “Then, all that data is hoovered into Facebook’s ‘search index’, and integrated with your personal social graph. Facebook then builds an interface to all you[r] app data, add in your Facebook social graph data, and then perhaps tosses in a side of Bing so you can have the whole web as a backdrop, should you care to.”

This is not only a tremendous opportunity for Facebook, but for Bing as well. If you’re concerned about Google’s competitive practices, think about that for a second.

The fact is, that people already search on Facebook all the time. Tell me you’ve never searched for a Facebook Page or a person using Facebook’s search. Businesses are all over Facebook. Think about if Facebook really started taking search seriously.

Facebook and Google are obviously already competitors in some areas (including engineering talent). Competition makes companies explore new strategies to maintain their edge. Microsoft is already Google’s main competitor (I’m not even going to get into the potential that Xbox and its new platform brings to the table).

What’s that old saying? The enemy of my enemy is my friend? Well, two of Facebook’s enemies are already pretty good friends, and neither of them like the competitive approach Google is taking these days.

By the way, Facebook is about to enable a lot more data sharing.

Should Facebook try to compete with Google in search? Tell us what you think.

Twitter General Counsel Alex Macgillivray tweeted:

And the company emailed around a statement saying:

For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results anytime they wanted to find something on the Internet.

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.

Google responded (via Google+ of course):

“We are a bit surprised by Twitter’s comments about Search plus Your World, because they chose not to renew their agreement with us last summer (http://goo.gl/chKwi), and since then we have observed their rel=nofollow instructions.”

Twitter hasn’t responded to that, exactly (at least to my knowledge), but Macgillivray did tweet on the subject again, this time pointing to a specific example of where Twitter is taking a backseat to Google+ for the query “@WWE”:

Folks asked for examples. Here’s what a user searching for “@wwe” will be shown on the new @Google. twitter.com/amac/status/15…

— Alex Macgillivray (@amac) January 11, 2012

In case you can’t see it well, the organic rankings are as follows: Official WWE site, WWE Google+ account and YouTube videos. The screen cap cuts of there, but after that comes WWE on Wikipedia, then WWE on Twitter.

Interestingly, when you hit the toggle button to display the results without Search Plus Your World, it makes no difference. I’m not sure if Twitter was ranking better for this prior to the rollout (my guess is not), but the fact that WWE on Google+ is ranking over WWE on Twitter in organic search seems like a separate issue (anti-competitive or not). Granted, Google+ does get the added boost from the prominent “People and Pages on Google+” section on the right-hand side, which is where much of the controversy lies.

Perhaps another question we should be asking is: does Twitter own the “@” symbol? When you search for @username, yes you are most likely looking for a Twitter account. Google knows this, I’m quite sure. It’s a valid point. But, on the other hand, the symbol has been adopted throughout social media, blog comments and forums simply as a way to address someone specific. Kind of like the hashtag has also been adopted by…Google+.

Danny Sullivan points out that Twitter still gets better placement for this query on Google than it does on Bing.

We’ll see if Google responds to this too.

By the way, it’s really easy to find WWE on Twitter. Even from Google. Type “WWE on Twitter” and boom. Top result.

More on Search Plus Your World:

Google Search Plus Your World May Draw FTC Complaint
Google’s Matt Cutts: “Search, Plus Your World” Returns More Than Just Google Content
Google “Search, Plus Your World” Makes Google More Personal Than Ever

Should Google be getting more personalized? Let us know what you think.

Now, Google has been doing personalized search to some extent for quite a while. Likewise, profiles have appeared in search results for quite some time. The new features are different in that the personal results will let users find info specifically for them. This may include Google+ photos and posts of their own and things that have been shared with them. Profiles will appear in both autocomplete and results. The “people and pages” feature comes in to enable users to find people profiles and Google+ pages related to topic areas of interest, and make it easy for users to follow these people.

“Search is pretty amazing at finding that one needle in a haystack of billions of webpages, images, videos, news and much more,” says Google Fellow Amit Singhal. “But clearly, that isn’t enough. You should also be able to find your own stuff on the web, the people you know and things they’ve shared with you, as well as the people you don’t know but might want to… all from one search box.”

Here’s a video Google put together showcasing the “search, plus your world” concept:

“As a child, my favorite fruit was Chikoo, which is exceptionally sweet and tasty,” says Singhal, sharing an example of where the new features may prove useful. “A few years back when getting a family dog, we decided to name our sweet little puppy after my favorite fruit. Over the years we have privately shared many pictures of Chikoo (our dog) with our family. To me, the query [chikoo] means two very sweet and different things, and today’s improvements give me the magical experience of finding both the Chikoos I love, right in the results page.”

Google+ Clearly Now More Important To Search

In terms of Profiles appearing in search, Google is demonstrating why it can pay off in search visibility to be active on Google+ and develop a substantial following. Before it was clear that this was beneficial, but now, you can see directly where this will help you. Not only will Google show people you are friends with, but it will show people it thinks you would be interested in.

Google says it will show autocomplete predictions for “various prominent people from Google+, such as high-quality authors from our authorship pilot program”. You can see this in action here:

Clearly, this is also another reason to use authorship markup.

People can click on these results and easily add the person to their circles on Google+.

It doesn’t look like brand pages will be showing up as autocomplete predictions. When asked about this, a Google spokesperson told WebProNews, “For profiles in search, you will see an autocomplete prediction for people who have Google+ profiles. These are people you’re connected to or popular people related to the query. For Google+ Pages, there’s Direct Connect (launched back in Nov).”

More on Direct Connect here.

Google is also showing people who discuss certain topics frequenty on Google+ in a special section on the right side of the search results page, when the user searches for that topic (such as “music” or “baseball”) :

Privacy

“When it comes to security and privacy, we set a high bar for Search plus Your World,” says Singhal. “Since some of the information you’ll now find in search results, including Google+ posts and private photos, is already secured by SSL encryption on Google+, we have decided that the results page should also have the same level of security and privacy protection. That’s part of why we were the first major search engine to turn on search via SSL by default for signed-in users last year. This means when you’re signed in to Google, your search results—including your private content—are protected by the same high standards of encryption as your messages in Gmail.”

That move was a bit controversial in the SEO community, as it made referrals harder to track. Not everyone was buying the privacy explanation Google was selling, but today’s new features do make that a little more believable. Google doesn’t want to face the kind of privacy backlash it did when it first launched Google Buzz in Gmail.

Google is providing privacy controls for search, similar to those found in Google+. Personal results are marked as “Public,” “Limited,” or “Only You,” which will be familiar to Google+ users. People in results are marked with the Google+ Circles they are in, or as suggested connections.

In addition to all of that, there is a toggle that appears on the upper right of the results page, where you can see what your search results look like without the personal content:

Turning it off will eliminate personalization based on web history as well. The toggle itself is for an individual search session, but you can also make it the default by going to your search settings and setting it that way.

Filter Bubble

While the new features will have their benefits to users for sure (at least for Google+ users), it would appear that they will only add to the “filter bubble” problem. The filter bubble, a phrased coined by Eli Pariser in a famous TED Talk (below), is this concept where the content we consume online is being more and more personalized towards us based on what sites know about us. The sites take this information that they have about us and direct us toward content that they think would be better for us.

While this may be convenient at times, some feel the filter bubble is keeping us from expanding our horizons. It’s making it harder to see things out of the box. It’s an obstacle to encountering great content that we might not see because we don’t have a direct connection to it. There are valid points to both sides of the debate (feel free to share your thoughts on this in the comments).

Google is by no stretch the only site engaging in this filter bubble concept, but given its massive reach and enormous search market share, it is arguably the most important site on the web to be considered with regards to said concept.

Is Google moving in the right direction?

Why Google’s Personalized Search is Still Lacking

Filter bubble aside, there is a use for personalized search, and despite Google being the king of search, there are obstacles keeping Google from the best it could be when it comes to organizing the world’s information. The lack of a deal with Twitter for realtime search is a prime example of this.

If Google could provide these new kinds of search results for Twitter and Facebook content and profiles, it would be a lot better. Google+ is a solid social network, but it’s not Facebook or Twitter in terms of user numbers. That makes it inferior for access to a broader set of information. That could change in time, but right now, that’s just how it is. Even if Google+ is able to achieve Facebook-like numbers, it still won’t be complete without Facebook.

In fact, it’s for this reason that tools like those from Wajam and Greplin still have a place for those seeking truly personalized search.

Still, the features really emphasize Google’s confidence in Google+ going forward. The fact that they continue to alter their flagship product – search – so much, with an increasing Google+ flavor indicates that they view Google+ as much more than Google Buzz or Google Wave (previous social offerings). Google+ just may be here to stay.

“Search, Plus Your World” is rolling out over the next few days to signed in users searching on https://www.google.com in English.

Do you think Google’s new personalization features are good or bad for search? Let us know in the comments.

The new campaign finds Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and his friends, taking center stage in four separate advertisements for Bing. Each advertisement was done in the same stop-motion puppet animation that was used in the original 1964 TV special, so it will have a nostalgic feel for most.

Check out the advertisements below. Each video is accompanied with the official video description:

“Bumble”, the more beloved name for the Abominable Snow Monster, features the lovable Bumble, who has lost his scary roar. He uses Bing to search for “scary monster” and once inspired by a few Bing Videos, perfects his roar to be appropriately scary again.

Santa and Mrs. Claus get a little crazy in the workshop with bubble wrap, search on Bing Video for bubble wrap how-to’s, and hilarious antics ensue.

Hermey, Yukon and Bumble are tired of the winter weather and are in dire need of a vacation. Bing Travel saves the day via a “fabulous island resort” search, highlighting Hermey’s friends who have “liked” specific resorts, leading to Bing Travel and the perfect destination.

Yukon Cornelius becomes exhausted from pulling Hermey and Rudolph on his sled and collapses in the snow. Luckily, Bing helps him find the closest hot yoga studio using Bing Local.

The holiday season is an opportune time for search engines, as this is when people do more searches – to find gifts, sales ads, party supplies, airfare, and literally anything else. With more people online, this means more ads that can be targeted and displayed by the search engine.

What did you think of the Bing holiday centric advertisements? Tell us your thoughts in the comments.

And at this year’s Web 2.0 summit, Hammer announced the imminent launch of his own search engine – WireDoo.

Set to officially launch sometime in December, WireDoo is currently in pre-beta. WireDoo.com simply prompts visitors to sign up for email alerts when the service becomes ready to use. But Hammer gave Web 2.0 a taste of what to expect.

Hammer explained that WireDoo is a “relationship-driven” deep search that he describes as “searches that go beyond the generalities, that give you more relative information in a consistent way, in one environment.”

For example, say you searched for a home. Along with the traditional results – the listings with real estate companies, the location – you will also see related content like information on surrounding schools, neighborhood activities, nearby restaurants, etc. Click on that related information and you will go even deeper. Say you clicked on nearby schools, you might see related information about GPA averages, teachers at the school, transportation and more.

He noted that “it’s about relationships, beyond the keywords.”

WireDoo is going to have to show up to the party with something incredibly special to take on the likes of Google, Bing and Yahoo – but who knows? Maybe Hammer is hiding something awesome in those parachute pants.

Here’s Hammer discussing his new search engine:

And here’s this…because I absolutely tried and failed to resist it:

Popular URL shortening service bitly has announced its version of social search, and it’s more about searching through popular content.

“bitly shortens 80 million URLs every day, give or take a few,” the company says. “Now, with our new search technology, we’re crawling and classifying every URL we shorten to create an index of the most ‘viral’ content on the web — content that’s broadly distributed, frequently-clicked, and trending at a high velocity.”

Bitly shares an example of a search for “onstar” comparing it to a Google search.

Bitly points out that there’s been some controversy surrounding OnStar tracking its customers, and that the top results here show news stories about the company and a blog post from a person talking about it, and that a Google search returns the company’s official site and its Wikipedia page – “results based on Google’s pagerank algorithm, which prioritizes the pages which are linked to by the most authoritative sites on the web.”

To be fair, when I searched Google for “onstar” the first two results are as bitly says, but the next one was an Engadget article about tracking. There are also several other first page results on the tracking topic, and the company’s Facebook and Twitter accounts, which in all honesty may be among the results a person wants if they just search for the “onstar” query.

“This is the challenge of the realtime search space — many of the pages are so new, so fresh, that they don’t have any pagerank,” says bitly. “A personal blog post isn’t authoritative in the way that the New York Times or Wired magazine is authoritative, but stories don’t find their way into Wired unless people like Jonathan Zdiarski [used in bitly's example] speak out. Increasingly, they do, and often they reach a broad audience on social media before more conventionally-authoritative newsgatherers amplify their messages. ”

There’s certainly a case for realtime search. No question. I thought Google did a fairly good job of it when they had it, but then they lost the Twitter firehose, and the feature went away. Sooner or later, Google is expected to bring it back, with data from Google+ and other sources. Google did launch realtime search in Google+ this week. Perhaps that is coming closer to fruition.

Rather than using a pagerank-type signal, bitly displays stories that it predicts will get the most attention over the next 24 hours. Then it uses its own analytics to refine the predictions in realtime. “Our search technology is based on the the most valuable measure of engagement: the click,” bitly says.

Bitly has even built a reputation monitoring service around this technology, with an alert system. It’s designed to warn you about “swings in volume and sentiment related to specific keywords” in realtime, as opposed to just showing you what’s already been said about you or your brand. There’s also a dashboard (pictured at the top of the article) where you can view keywords you’re tracking. This feature rolls out to beta testers and bitly Enterprise users over the next couple weeks.

An explanation of Julpan on its site says:

Behind our products is a new type of search engine powered by the social web. Our algorithms crunch social activity like status updates, tweets, facebook likes, and rss feeds right as it’s happening to provide you with the freshest relevant content.

In addition to helping us rank content the social and realtime web allows us to understand the context of a query at any given moment. For example, if you searched for “london” during the recent London riots our search engine will automatically adapt and present you with “london riots” results.

Allon has been named Director of Engineering at Twitter. In a note on the Julpan site, he posted the following message:

I am very proud to announce that Julpan has been acquired by Twitter.

I’d like to personally thank the talented engineers, architects and designers of Julpan. I couldn’t have asked for a better group of people with whom to invent some of the world’s best social search technology.

According to Liz Gannes at All Things D, the Julpan team of 12 is going to Twitter’s New York office.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Developer Andrew Shen, for example, has created a browser extension called Search Extension for Google Plus, which searches Google+ public contents and profiles. It includes filters for

• All contents
• Only posts
• Only profiles
• Only posts from Buzz
• Only posts from Google Reader

There is also an Android app for it.

If you don’t want to install anything, you can still use the search engine, as it’s simply available at googleplussearch.chromefans.org. It’s built on Google Custom Search. On the site, it also provides “Hot Trends” from Google+.

Also, don’t forget that Wajam recently started letting users add their Google+ circles to its social search experience. This will allow results from people you’re connected with on Google+ to appear in results as you search Google, Bing, Yahoo and various other sites.

Wajam is available as a browser extension. It gives you access to results from the social networks you use when such results would make sense the most – while you’re already searching for things.

The company tells WebProNews that they’ve begun rolling out Wajam Places – location-based search results from your friends – in Google, Bing and Yahoo. This includes search results like:

• friends who LIVE in the city you search for
• places that your friends have LIKED in this city
• places your friends have CHECKED-IN to
• PHOTOS taken by your friends at this location

Wajam: Get your friends’ knowledge when you need it from Wajam on Vimeo.

A community manager for the company tells us they’re excited about the new offering, but admits there is a challenge to manage with the “huge amount of data” it has.

Wajam recently released another interesting feature, which puts puts its social results on a number of popular sites around the web when you search on them (like eBay, Wikipedia, IMDB and others). Last month, they also started integrating Google+ results in to the mix.