Now +1 Gets Interesting: Button Launches On YouTube, Android Market, Best Buy… Oh, And TechCrunch

We broke the news yesterday that Google was planning to announce today that the +1 button is going to be added to partner websites. The news leaked after one of the partners, Clearspring, leaked the news. The official announcement has just been posted on Google’s blog, with a few more details on the partnerships.

As you heard in March, the +1 button allows you to recommend content to your friends and contacts directly from Google search results and ads. Google is now releasing +1 buttons to the whole web, allowing select publishers and site owners to embed the button on their sites.

Initial partners include HuffPo, Bloomberg, BestBuy, Nordstrom, O’Reilly, The Washington Post, Reuters, TechCrunch and a host of others. Google also says it plans to add +1 buttons to many of its own properties, including YouTube, Android Market, Blogger, and Product Search.

The functionality on partner sites is similar to the way you interact with a Facebook ‘like’ button. When you see a +1 button on these sites, you can recommend a product, news article, movie or other content to your friends. When your Google connections search for content or a site, they will see your +1’s their search results.

What’s interesting about this announcement is that +1 could eventually alter search results (if you are logged out). So the more +1’s a piece of content or product has, the higher the search result for that page. It would be another signal social data is a key strategy for Google going forward and we heard back in March, that Google envisions +1 data influencing search results across the board. With more publishers and ecommerce sites signed up, Google has way more social data to possibly use in search.