Could Google's recent change "Search, Plus Your World" be a "Netflix" faux pas causing a similar mass exodus of users from Google to Microsoft's Bing search engine? Well, at least one high-profile website, Gizmodo has one of its columnists jumping ship. The new search integrates Google+ (Google's Facebook competitor) content directly into search results. It includes "personal results" which include Google+ status updates, Picasa photos, blog posts, etc. that have been privately shared with you as well as your own content. It will also examine your past searches and display results based on your search activity or what you clicked on.All the personalized search results pushes other relevant content down by being placed at the top of the page. Gizmodo explains:
It deeply integrated Google+ into search results. It's ostensibly meant to deliver more personalized results. But it pulls those personalized results largely from Google services—Google+, Picasa, YouTube. Search for a restaurant, and instead of its Yelp page, the top result might be someone you know discussing it on Google Plus. Over at SearchEngineland, Danny Sullivan has compiled a series of damning examples of the ways Google's new interface promotes Plus over relevancy. Long story short: It's a huge step backwards.Sure you can opt-out - it's not that difficult. However, in my experience as CTO managing IT support and doing my own IT support, I know how users think and they often can't be troubled to figure out even simple computer tasks. If something requires even minimal effort they'll just move onto something simpler that doesn't require as much effort. Some of it can be attributed to laziness, but many users just aren't that tech-savvy and want things spoon-fed to them.
By Google now making their main search engine return less relevant results, there could be a mass exodus to Bing. Finally, Google may have met a worthy search engine competitor! Yahoo battled Google for years and wasn't able to dethrone the "king of search". With this one move by Google to ram socialized results down our throats, they may have just opened the door for Microsoft's Bing to steal a bigger slice of Google's dominant search engine market share.
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