Welcome back Rankers. Going to talk about Google+ today, it’s been frustrating me just a little bit. First of all, up until now, apparently there’s another one on it’s way, the app on IOS for Google+ is pretty sucky. Google+ has announced today though, it is open for anyone to use so anyone can join up to Google+. They’ve also opened up their API for Google hangouts, that’s the live video experience so it will be interesting to see what developers can come up with there. They’ve also announced that if you have an android phone that you will now have mobile hangouts, which is very interesting. So that’s mobile video group conferencing and they’ve also announced a couple of other things to do with document sharing and those sorts of things on hangouts. Which is great.
The thing that is frustrating me this morning is the new search feature in Google+. Now this is something I have wanted for a while. The reason I want search for Google+, well, just have a look at my Tweet Deck. You can see there I’ve got way too many search columns, right. It slows the whole desktop right down and after a while I have to shut down tweet deck because there’s so much going on. So, I was hoping Google+ was going to get to the point with search so that I could start using that more than Tweet deck. The reason I haven’t been using Google+ as much as I would have liked to use it is because of the lack of a good experience on an IOS device (Iphone, Ipad). That’s when I do most of my tweeting or social mediaing, does that make sense? It’s when I’m on a laid back device and I really don’t have that with Google+. Google+ is great at the desktop but it sucks on a mobile device. Well, and Apple mobile device, maybe it’s great on android.
The thing that’s frustrating me with search this morning, first of all thank you to Josh Rowe for sharing this on Google+ and bringing it to my attention, if you now go into Google+ and search for anything you will get these results here which you can do Save this Search. This particular search I’m doing here is a name of a website that was involved in the GoDaddy hosting compromise last week and one of our clients and good mate, David Meerman-Scott’s site got infected with this malware which we fixed. I wrote a blog post on how we fixed it and how we restored the Google rankings and all those sorts of things. I’ve done a search for that and you can here that we’ve got Best of and Most Recent. If we click Most Recent you are going to find my other persona talking about it but if you click Best of that’s what you will see. Interestingly, I also put in the title of that blog post “godaddy malware” and the reason this is interesting for me is that it’s been driving me nuts this morning and the staff are probably wondering when is Jim going to get the show out? The reason why I’m late today is because it’s just driving me crazy. OK so there’s me but if I go and do the search by the way you can now save these searches and they come up in your Google sparks which is similar to what you can do with Twitter, you can save a search and see who’s talking about that thing and dip into it whenever you want. You can search either Google+ posts, people, everything or just sparks. Sparks is for the most part the web, but it has a slightly different algorithm to it than the actual web algorithm. If you look I’ve got godaddy malware and we’ve got here stewartmedia.biz is #1 for that search and domains directory is #2 whereas if I do that same search on a browser where I’m not logged into Google in any way shape or form you can see that that domains directory is #1 and godaddy.com is #2 and we are down here at about #6. You can see that there is a good difference. Now the only sites that a relevant to that search that I just did, for me, is the #1 result which is great, is this register.co.uk result which is great. This one’s not which is back in May, this one is relevant and of course the one I wrote is relevant. Out of the top 7 results only 4 are relevant but remember where I’ve done this sparks search I’m actually logged into Google+. If you want to have a look at Google+ posts then it’s just people talking about it and People that would be something that would appear in their bio or their About section or maybe their name or whatever and then we have Everything. So, if then we go back to our Comino browser which I’m not logged into Google+ and I do a search for godaddy malware you can see here the post that I made actually on Google+ which is this one here where I just announced the link to the blog post. I didn’t actually put any other content around it, all I did was put the link and let Google bring in the rest from the actual blog post. Now when I do the actual search here not logged into Google+ which you can now do if you want to do a Google+ search so you can find out what people are talking about within Google+ but you don’t have a profile or you want to do it not logged in just go to plus.google.com/s/ If you do that we get the Hacker News here which was the 17th of September but my actual post on Google+ doesn’t appear at all. See here we’ve got Best Of and Most Recent, if we do Most Recent we can see the line up changes. This guy, this Kevin Burns, he still stays there and he’s the man that’s been driving me nuts this morning because he’s #2 in Best Of, he posted it yesterday so it makes sense that he’s there in Most Recent. One of the things that is different here and my post doesn’t appear at all and as far as I know it’s probably about the first or second post on Google+ about it but guess what I didn’t actually write anything, I just placed a link to the blog post. So therefore it’s probably less important because all I did was place a link, it wasn’t actually me saying anything about the link. So the lesson here is if you’re using Google+ it’s probably a good idea to say something about the link. But this guy Kevin Burns, why he’s driving me crazy is because his post has got no shares, the word malware doesn’t appear anywhere in his post but godaddy does and godaddy’s in the title and the link and all the rest of it. So there’s a couple of signals there. This #1 post has had 4 shares, 2 +1’s and one of the comments has a +1 and it’s got Godaddy in this information up here, he’s actually written that, so he’s got godaddy and malware in the actual post. So the lesson here is if you’re linking to something, write about it, use your keywords in the Google+ post that you’re writing about if you want to come up in Google+ search. So it’s operating very differently from say Google normal search in that you’re not going to get things in here that are really old, mainly because Google+ isn’t that old anyway. Even the sparks results where we’ve got everything, if we have a look at sparks again for godaddy malware (this is me not logged in) you can see here stewartmedia.biz is #1 for that phrase on sparks, domains directory is again #2 so sparks is operating slightly differently to the results that we’re seeing in actual Google. I think this is an actual signal as to where Google is heading for certain types of searches. It won’t apply to all searches because there are a whole host of searches that people will do that have nothing to do with how recently they were posted. You could be doing something on JFK or whatever, you’re not interested in recent results. It’s all very interesting, Kevin Burns has been frustrating the hell out of me but I think I’ve worked it out. I thought maybe it’s all the shares but I had a look at his profile, he says he’s a blogger but then I couldn’t find any blog posts that he’d written. I was searching everywhere then I thought well, maybe there’s a lot that he’s doing on twitter or maybe something else, it wasn’t. Basically it’s because he mentioned those words actually in his post. I did this whole search too in Google+ for the title of the article on the register.uk for this particular phrase and the #1 result wasn’t Kevin, it was Joltrast. It doesn’t make any sense there because of the words that she’s used there except she’s probably more recent 12.53 yesterday and Kevin was earlier, so there goes that theory. But it’s interesting and I hope you have enjoyed that. If you do get onto Google+ please hook up with me and we may even have a hangout. Won’t that be something to do.
We’ll see you next week. Thanks very much. Bye.
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