Is Google's New Social Search Strategy Too Much, Too Soon?

Netflix redux?

Too harsh? Maybe, but the market is responding with neither enthusiasm - nor awe - at Google's significant new change to its search engine, the key to its dominance. The problem does not appear to be technical, nor technological. Nor is it necessarily utilitarian. But rather, we are back to a problem that has plagued Silicon Valley - and its distant relations in the Seattle area - for years. To whit, that people, particularly intelligent, tech-savvy people, dont like having change forced down their proverbial throats.

The industry has a well-earned reputation for arrogance and especially for assuming that they know better than you do what is good for you. Tech's 'bedside manner,' the facility for empathetic human interaction whose absence is often decried in young doctors, has all too often been found wanting.

Years of research on the keys to successful technological adoption and productivity gains by MIT's Erik Brynjolfsson and others point to human factors as the key to advancing the efficiency of new approaches. It seems astonishing this most basic and easily addressed set of personal issues may once again trip up another of the world's best informed companies. JL

Sarah Kessler comments at Mashable:

Google’s recent change to its search engine is losing in the public opinion arena.

Analysts have suggested the new feature, Google Search, plus Your World, “Pushes Google+ over Relevancy,” and “just made Bing the best search engine.” Twitter called it “bad for people.”
Meanwhile, about 2,000 Mashable readers have answered the poll question, “Would you prefer that Google, etc. go back to their old ‘natural’ search methods or do you find that inclusion of this data makes it easier to find what you’re looking for?” Sixty-three percent of them said they don’t want social search results.

But is the idea behind “Search, plus Your World” terrible? We’re not so sure.

Social connections are a potentially great way to determine relevance. That’s why Google, Bing, Blekko and DuckDuckGo have been incorporating social data into their results long before Search plus Your World arrived on the scene. And it’s hard to argue that some facets of Google’s new search feature aren’t useful. When you search for a name, for instance, the new feature returns results for the “Ben Smith” you are connected to rather than for hundreds of other men who share his name. Adding someone to a social network directly from a search results page? That saves me a step. And there are some searches for which social context is important.

What I dislike about Search plus Your World isn’t that Google has more deeply integrated social data on its search results pages. It’s that the search engine has gone overboard with Google+ in a way that makes me feel like I’m being force-fed a new social network. It’s too much, too soon.