Google to provide personal search results
Source: Casey Newton
For years, Googling for personal information has been a hit-or-miss proposition. For every time the search engine finds content related to you, its algorithms are just as likely to turn up scores of irrelevant links.
That could start to change this week with the rollout of Your World, a set of personal search results that will begin popping up whenever you Google, the company announced Tuesday.
The personal results will draw on content that users post on Google+, the company's fledgling social network. Photo albums uploaded there will be searchable from Google, for example, as will be written posts by users and their friends.
Google says the effect will be search results that are more relevant to users.
"What we're launching today is the next evolution of search," said Ben Smith, a Google Fellow who worked on the project. "We're bringing in a whole new class of content that search couldn't previously deal with."
But the announcement found Google subject to a barrage of criticism from Twitter and industry observers, who argued that the changes would exclude content from social networks and other sites from top search results. The change was widely seen as a defensive move against Facebook, which does not allow user profiles to be crawled by search engines.
Sharing data
"In the long run, it's bad for Facebook, bad for Google, and bad for all of us," wrote John Battelle, a tech journalist and longtime Google observer, on his Searchblog site. Battelle called for the companies to work together to share data in a way that improved both sites.
Google, which originated as a simple way to find Web pages, has evolved over the years to search an ever-growing list of data, including images, news, products, books, local businesses, videos, blogs and patents.
It has also increasingly tailored its results to individual users. The company began returning results based on users' behavior in 2005, according to a history put together by online publication Search Engine Land. In 2009, results became social - users of Gmail, Google Reader and other products began seeing their results adjusted based on links their friends had recommended or shared.
But important personal content remains off-limits to Google - notably on Facebook, where Google's search engine cannot crawl. That means profiles, photos, status updates and other information on Facebook can't be included in Google searches.
Google+, the social network that Google introduced last year, offers an answer: Because Google owns the network, its data can be delivered in search results.
Changes will become visible to users starting this week. A user who tags a dozen photos on Google+ with the name of her dog, for example, will see those pictures in her search results when she Googles the dog's name. If she searches a water-cooler topic like "49ers," any of her friends' Google+ posts that contain the term will show up in her results as well.
Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Land, said the changes marked search results' "most radical transformation ever."
"The new system will perhaps make life much easier for some people, allowing them to find both privately shared content from friends and family plus material from across the web through a single search, rather than having to search twice using two different systems," Sullivan wrote on his site.
Privacy concerns
But the feature might also raise privacy concerns, he said, if content posted to Google+ privately is shared more widely than the user originally intended. Google will let users opt out of personal results - on a search-by-search basis, using a toggle button on the results page, or permanently, in their search settings.
Still, critics of the changes said they represent an unwelcome move among large Internet companies to confine users to their sites, rather than share data in ways that would benefit users.
Alex Macgillivray, Twitter general counsel and a former lawyer for Google, called the news a "bad day for the Internet." "Having been there, I can imagine the dissension @Google to search being warped this way," Macgillivray said in a tweet.
The changes could also decrease the likelihood that Twitter profiles show up as top results when Google users search for a name. Later in the day, Twitter released a statement criticizing the changes, saying the move would make it less likely that tweets about world events and breaking news would show up in search results.
"We're concerned that as a result of Google's changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone," the company said. "We think that's bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users."
A Google spokesman said that other social networks' terms of service prevent Google from accessing their content and using it in search results.
"Google does not have access to fully crawl the content on some sites, so it's not possible for us to surface all that information," the spokesman said. "Ushering in the new era of social and private data search will take close cooperation, and we hope other sites participate so we can provide the best possible experience for our users."
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