How’s Google’s Mind?

Jan 26, 2012 by Ajeet Khurana

Search Plus Your World. It’s a mouthful, isn’t it? It’s full of something else too. Google’s new search results are not really news anymore. Not now that Danny Sullivan has written his very extensive post explaining it all and Matt McGee has extolled its virtues and Twitter has damned it for the evil it is. Right, so calling it evil is perhaps a bit extreme, but it is corrupted. Or is it?

You see, Google used to want to make all the information in all the world available to all the people in it. Now it seems like it just wants to give you stuff your friends like. Or, as Andrew Nattan (unmemorabletitle.co.uk) says, it wants to give you your own results back.

It certainly is easy to get lost in all the anti-Google, slam-personal results hype.

What seems to have been lost in all the headlines is the fact that the new system actually allows you to return to old style results. Really old style results – the kind of results that aren’t tainted by personalisation of any kind. It’s right there, in Sullivan’s post; you can opt-out of the intensely personalised results and see normal results for the first time since the whole personal/social thing came into play in December 2009.

While the default setting is opt-in (which never feels right), there are two ways in which you can opt out. One way is on a search-by-search basis and requires you to click the ‘unpersonalised search’ button. The other is on a permanent basis via Search Settings.

So, while a lot of knee-jerk reactions (including the author’s), were to cry foul and mourn the imminent loss of objective information, the truth is that objective information is nearer at hand than it has been in just over two years. And that is akin to bliss for people who liked the internet before it got all ‘social’.

You can bet your boots that the new search results won’t be perfect. There will almost certainly be errors that will result in private information being made public and people will panic when they realise just how much of their private information is out there – even if it is only accessible to a limited audience. You can also be pretty sure that personalised results will taint the unpersonalised ones.

But that’s not really the point. The point is that Google has started a bit of a revolution. It’s giving internet users the best of both worlds – personal and objective search.

And if it all goes belly up, we can always turn to Bing.

Sandy writes on behalf of Mediatorr, a digital marketing agency that provides SEO services, as well as PPC, online PR and social media marketing. This article was written by a guest author. Would you like to write for us?