Google Introduces Search, plus Your World (Video)

Bringing your world into Search

Google introduces Search plus Your World

Mountain View, CA – January 10, 2012. Today, Google is introducing Search plus Your World for searches on Google.com in English. This trio of new search features brings your world, rich with people and information, into search. Search plus Your World helps you 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.

Google Search has always been about finding the best result for you — that one needle in a haystack of billions of webpages, images, videos, news and more. But that isn’t always enough. Sometimes the result you need is in your personal content or something shared with you by people you care about. We’re transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships. We began this transformation with Social Search, and today we’re taking another big step in this direction by introducing these three new features:

1. Personal Results, which enables you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts—both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page;
2. Profiles in Search, both in autocomplete and results, which enables you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following; and,
3. People and Pages, which helps you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and lets you follow them with just a few clicks.

Together, these features combine to create Search plus Your World, which will become available over the next few days to people who are signed in and searching on https://www.google.com in English. Search is simply better with your world and all of your people in it, and we’re just getting started.

Personal Results
Say you’re looking for a vacation destination. Just as in real life, your friends’ experiences are often more meaningful to you than impersonal content on the web, so you may want to check out what vacations your friends have taken. With your world in search, you can find:

• Google+ posts. Find relevant Google+ posts from friends talking about a trip they just took, whether they’ve shared privately with you or publicly.
• Photos. See vacation photos from your friends right in your search results page. You can also find your own private photos from Google+ and Picasa, based on captions, comments and album title.

Profiles in Search
Every day, there are hundreds of millions of searches for people. Sometimes it’s hard to find the person you’re looking for, and once you do find them, there’s no way for you to actually interact with them. Search plus Your World makes it easy to find and interact with people online. Typing just the first few letters of a person’s name brings up a personalized profile prediction in autocomplete. Selecting a predicted profile takes you to a results page for that person, which includes information from their Google+ profile and web results related to them. Once you select a profile, if you’re a signed-in Google+ user, you’ll see a button to add that person to your circles right on your search results page.

People and Pages
Using Search plus Your World, if you search for a topic like [music] or [baseball], you might see prominent people who frequently discuss this topic on Google+ appearing on the right-hand side of the results page. You can connect with them on Google+, strike up meaningful conversations and discover entire communities in a way that wasn’t possible before.

Security, transparency and control
We set a high bar for security and privacy for Search plus Your World. Searches by signed-in users on Google.com are secured by SSL encryption by default. 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.

We also want to be transparent about how these features work and give you control over how to use them. With today’s changes, we provide visibility and control settings similar to those in Google+. For example, personal results are clearly marked as Public, Limited or Only you.

We’re also introducing a toggle button on the results page that lets you see search results without personal content. With a single click, you can see an unpersonalized view of search results — no results from your friends, no private information and no personalization of results based on your Web History.

This toggle button works for an individual search session, or you can make this the default in your Search Settings.

For more details about Search plus Your World, including a video demonstration and screenshots, visit the Official Google Blog.