Google has gone to great lengths to promote Google+. With the platform trailing far behind Facebook in user volume many believe that Facebook has already won, but those insisting that this is about winning are missing an important point when it comes to Google’s reasons for creating Google+.
A Total Experience
From the beginning of Google, even as far back as it’s Stanford University days, the idea was to create a search engine that would deliver relevant search results.
Our final design goal was to build an architecture that can support novel research activities on
large-scale web data. To support novel research uses, Google stores all of the actual documents it crawls in compressed form. One of our main goals in designing Google was to set up an environment where other researchers can come in quickly, process large chunks of the web, and produce interesting results that would have been very difficult to produce otherwise.-From The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Sergei Brin and Larry Page
Google has been doing this ever since. Search has been transforming into information for a while, but with the advent of social, Google can better understand the conceptual relationship between humanity and the events which makes us who we are. Google+ in many ways helps Google determine virtual relationships connected to events, but also people, locations, brands, and historical points of interest.
In the last 12 months Google bought 3 companies that will enhance their Google+ platform. These are Meebo, Katango, and Zagat. Already we see an enhancement in the Google+ platform through localization of Google+ connected to Zagat (replacing the Places format) and more socialized Google+ Circles and trending interests connected to a variety of Katango patents.
Mining Their Own Data
All of this social data is helping Google provide a search experience that is overall much more enriching, relevant, and interesting than ever before. Ultimately social for Google provides the data they need to better understand the concepts that drive human relationships with the language they use to search.
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