16 October, 2011
By Greg Morgan
Google are constantly making changes to their social search algorithms, many of which go by unnoticed. One of the latest changes concerns people who own a blog and have it connected to their Google profile.
Google are now highlighting pages that you have linked to via your blog, using information they have always had access to and used as part of their ranking system. While this will be a useful feature for many people, it does require you to integrate your blog with your Google profile.
In essence, this is one of the many ways that Google, Facebook, and other online giants are trying to keep everything in house by developing interconnected systems. However, this feature does work with any blogging platform, as long as it is linked to your Google profile.
This Google Social Search extension works both for blogs you own and those that are owned by people you are connected with through your profile. If it is a blog you own, the text says “you shared this on blog”, while if it someone else’s handy work, it says “connected name shared this on blog”.
This feature, along with many other new offerings by Google, is an attempt to socialise the Internet and make the world that little bit smaller. The amount of information online is expanding beyond belief all the time, and people are increasingly interested only in information that makes sense in their own community.
