Is Google Search Plus Your World Narrowing the World’s Access to Knowledge?

Google has launched a personalised new addition called Google Search Plus Your World. This feature gives users a more personalised search experience by integrating social media sites into their searches.

This highly visual change provides searchers with things their friends have shared on social media channels. Google states that the Google Search Plus Your World includes broad-based search results, but the reality is that its own Google Plus network seems to be dominating the results!

Google Search Plus Your World highly ranks Google Plus profile pages, even if they are not an individual’s most prominently used social media platform. Competitors such as Twitter and Facebook are not pleased with Google’s self-promotional tactics and have even launched a ‘don’t be evil’ plugin called ‘Focus on the User’.

This shows that when a person is searched on Google, the new Google Search Plus Your World will display their Google Plus profile page rather than their Facebook or Twitter accounts.

There is an outcry that Google is abusing its power and altering organic search results to further its own new social network. It has been recorded that Facebook and YouTube get about 16% of downstream Google clicks and Facebook alone receives approximately 20% or US page views.

It is arguable as to whether or not the top dominating networks such as Facebook need to be concerned with Google’s efforts to promote their social network (Google’s social media has a much smaller following comparatively).

Competing social networks believe that there is a real need to change the ways of this personalised search. They state that it not only muddies the waters of organic search, but with the combination of Google Plus’s superior search placement, monopoly search market share, account building and user laziness there is a potential for a full Google takeover.

What are your thoughts on this social integration into the Google search?