Twitter vs. Google+: ‘Search, plus Your World’ (A Twitter Overshot) Social Media Simplify Twitter vs. Google+: ‘Search, plus Your World’ (A Twitter Overshot) Social Media Simplify

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18 January, 2012

Twitter vs. Google+: ‘Search, plus Your World’ (A Twitter Overshot)


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Last few days, starting from 10th Jan, 2012, entire (social media & blogging) world was/is discussing the hottest topic of Twitter vs. Google+ on the battle field named ‘Search, Plus Your World’.


"Search, plus Your World’ immediately came under the rage of Twitter who fired back on this latest development calling it to be a monopolistic move towards a narrower social networking space.


Before I describe my points how Twitter overshot, I would like to give you a briefing on how would this latest search feature work for you.

A. To experience this new feature, you must be logged into your Google account.

B. You can select either the personal results or the global results.

C. You can control what you want to see (whether personal results or global results) by using the button as in the image below:
D. You would notice the result portion on top showing how many results (both personal and global) are there.

E. Personal results would show up with a blue colored character icon with the latest posts on top.
F. Under personal results, you would see a sidebar with “People & Pages  from Google+”.

G. Personal results would show you updates, photos, profiles from your circles (and from the people in your connections’ circles too).

H. You could also get customized search results based on your search history on Google.

If you still find it confusing, I suggest that you visit this Google link: http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=2413802

Twitter overshot; but how?

Within a few hours of launch of this new search feature by Google, Twitter responded as “people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users” would suffer from not being able to quickly see tweets in search results. As we’ve seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter; as a result, twitter accounts and Tweets are often the most relevant results,” Even Twitter General Counsel Alex Macgillivray called it as a “bad day for the Internet”.

But that was quite quick from Twitter, I guess. They have shown their own interest level in search results without concerning the beauty of personalized search that could benefit all the online masses across the globe.

Here’s how twitter exactly overshot…

1. It’s ‘Search, plus Your World’ and NOT ‘Search+ your world’: I must say branding of this new Google search feature was not good, actually worse in other sense. The name that Google described it with is really confusing. Pronouncing by Google+, people call it Search+. But it’s actually NOT a search enhanced with something within, rather it’s a search integrated with an option where you could combine your social sphere while performing a search. You can always control whether you want to see the results from your personal network or from the entire global results. To mention again, this new search feature is available only when you are logged into your Google+ account.

2. An Influential Search: In Google’s own words – “Search is pretty amazing at finding that one needle in a haystack of billions of webpages, images, videos, news and much more. 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.” And indeed a search that understands your network & influence circle would have always been better than the search that merely gives you thousands of blind choices to have faith upon.

3. The Authentic Search: If you are somehow attached to the practices of SEO, you may disagree. But the fact is that we all look for authenticity or at-least a hint that indicates the source (link) to be authentic or trustworthy while making a search on any search engine. In most of our day to day search, we often land up on pages that we were not even looking for. Under such an influence, I don’t think the ability to see the contents/suggestions from our network is really a vague an idea as most of the people opposing Google describe.


4. Why it’s NOT an intended favor towards G+: If you talk about the exclusion of other social platforms, I would love to tell you that Google still indexes the Twitter and Facebook contents those are publicly available. Even Danny Sullivan says and shows so in his post in Marketing Land. The agreement between Twitter and Google towards the real time search that went down last year is the next big thing to mention here. If Google needs to come under a pact to crawl Twitter’s database, then it is crystal clear that at-least there is a part that Twitter doesn’t make available publicly. Same is the case with Facebook; we all know that Facebook never made the FB pages and social graph public.

(John Battelle, in his post “Compete to Death, or Cooperate to Compete?” gives a close account of the deals in between these social networking giants.)

So, what do you think…? Should we rejoice that ‘Search, plus your world’ empowers the social networking by a step further (as I do) or should we blame Google to be unfair? Does it really depict something like Twitter vs. Google+?

1 comment:

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