Since Google announced in July that there would be Google Plus business pages there has been speculation that Google would integrate Plus and Places. We saw some early Plus Plus Places (a mouthful..) integration in November but now Google appears to be testing P+P (or is it ++P) integration using the rel=author tag as the glue between the two.
Over the weekend I found these author images in blended Places search results for the phrases DUI Lawyers Phoenix and Criminal Defense lawyer Orlando. They appeared and disappeared so I assume that they are tests and not the final implementation.
Interestingly the blended result with a rel-auth photo doesn’t show a link to the business’s Place page . More importantly it does not show your Google reviews and star ratings. For now anyways, the image appearing in the blended results adds a unique attribute to the listing that makes the listing stand out but the missing star ratings is problematic. Who knows what the final implementation will look like.
If you are logged in and hover over the “by author” link you are presented an option to add the author to your circle. If you click on it you are taken to their Plus Page.
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With the rollout of Google Search Plus Your World, there has been a great deal of discussion about whether Google’s actions are a basis for antitrust. I tend to agree with internet lawyer Eric Goldman’s assessment:
From a legal standpoint, I don’t think Search Plus Your World adds very much to the antitrust complaints against Google (and some of the complaints, especially Twitter’s, seem more like sour grapes than bona fide concerns). It’s just another example where Google is cross-promoting its services, which is not inherently wrong and often can improve the consumer experience. However, if Google can’t prove to us that each of its specific choices to integrate Google+ are in our best interests given the widespread speculation that they weren’t, Google creates a major wedge in the trust relationship with users–and invites judges and regulators to impute bad motives to Google if they want.
The issues revolve more around user trust than antitrust. The full impact of the change has yet to be felt in Local BUT a number of other recent efforts by Google to cross promote their own properties have started to impact local results.
Here is a branded local search for Barbara Oliver Buffalo. Google has made sure that Barbara Oliver & Co Jewelry’s local brand and website are readily accessible from search. She certainly seems to be benefiting from Google’s brand focus.
However, her site, like many SMB sites, uses an embedded Google MyMap on the directions page and and offers an embedded YouTube video. She also has a very lightly used Plus Page. That hardly seems to warrant the high ranking that each of those pages have received. There are seven links to Google properties above the fold that lead to Maps, Places, YouTube, Plus and MyMaps. Clearly Google is also cross promoting their other properties but one certainly has to question whether the searcher is best served by these results.
I have captured a Bing search result for comparison purposes so that you can decide which engine returns the most relevant results for the branded search. Let me know which one you think offers more relevant results.
(click to see larger)
To see the Bing screen shot of the branded search for Barbara Oliver Buffalo….
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Google seems to be adding Plus content just about every place these days and folks are none too happy about it. It seems that they have now added it to the search suggestions as well (this may have been seen perviously but this is the first I had seen it.). Now that’s annoying…and it gets more so the more people you follow on Plus.
