In a move that was pretty much inevitable in Google’s overall strategy of eventual Google+ integration into most if not all Google products, the search engine has announced that it will now be including publicly shared Google+ posts in its “social search” results.
Users logged into their Google+ accounts will eventually see a “Blah blah shared this on Google” if they’re searching for a keyword that matches up with something that’s been posted by someone publicly in one of their Google+ circles. As someone who rarely paid attention to my “social search” results before, I’m pretty meh about how useful this is.
But, since the “social search” results already included Twitter, Flickr LinkedIn and Quora, this isn’t at all a earth-shattering move. In fact, as Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan points out, the service may already have been live and what we’re seeing today is just the public announcement of it.
Google says they’ll be rolling out the feature over the next couple days. What I’ve really got my fingers crossed for is the return of Google Realtime Search.
Update: After getting confirmation from Google, Danny Sullivan responds, “It’s new. Posts you share on Google+ now appear and rank better. Previously, only posts you shared elsewhere would.”