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Google has been focused on search results all the time. Every company they acquired in the past, had to do with improving their search engine with better results and growing their user insights to better match results with local advertisers’ AdWords campaigns. More recently, Google started investing in local businesses and in Social Search (or even better : social services). One could wonder: why? Is it because they want to make the web more open? Possibly. More likely is it that they are – once more – improving their search results.

A sum up of our findings…

The impact of Local Businesses on Search

Latest initiatives in this field are the following:

• Google Maps – OK, this exists already for a long while, but more and more you can find local businesses on the Google homepage (search for “aannemers in Gent” for instance)
• each local business can now claim his local business information on a Google Place page and have a “owner verified listing” notification showing web results, reviews, links, pictures, transit information, directions etc
• Nearby Places you might like (a new addition to a local businesses’ Place page) offers an overview of (surprisingly) places nearby that you might like, based on other users’ reviews
• Coupons for Local Businesses – now a local business can add a realtime coupon or update to his local page, pushing his entry up the results and enabling it to be more relevant
• Pages now even have detailed “What people are saying about” your steak, your wine, your service, … entries
• Favorite Places – overviews of rated local businesses near large (for the moment) US cities including the possibility for local businesses to direct people from their window to reviews about their store, shop, hotel, restaurant, … including nifty QR-codes spreading it in the real world
• Near me now – a mobile web solution when you are looking for a restaurant nearby and want some user ratings to make the right decision – right from the ease of the Google Mobile homepage (iPhone 3.0 & US residents only currently) was launched recently
• Google Places Directory - an Android application with web search reviews of restaurants, hotels, gas stations, parking places etc. is similar to the “near by me” feature on Google Search but in a native application. The same content is used for Google Maps to be more accurate.
• speaking of which, the Google Maps for Android version has mobile maps including driving directions, traffic information (even transit directions for trains, metros and busses!) to the same directory of (local advertisers’) places (and even your favorite skiing resort)
• Google Maps “starring” (adding places to favorites) of local places are now synced from your mobile maps (both iPhone and Android) to your pc’s maps
• and are pushed in the Personalized Suggestions for Maps

I can hear you think out loud: not everyone has a Google account  and not everyone uses all those features Google offers. Both are true, but concerning the former: 173 million people have Google Mail accounts up to date (even more have a Google account)  and Google Buzz is one of those tools that will boost this number even further. More and more people subscribe on YouTube and create google accounts at the same time. Etc. The latter is also true. This is called the participation inequality:

• only little people “create” the web (1%?),
• some “enhance” the web (7%?) by including content in their blogs, adding comments or likes
• others “share” the web (15%?) with their connections on their favorite social platforms.
• all other people are “surfing” the web (or “lurking” as Jakob Nielsen called it in 2006) and reading what the others created, enhanced or shared.

In short:

Google wants more people to “create”, “enhance” and “share” content using Google accounts – starting with listings where the money comes from: those from adwords advertisers. Because more ratings, means more relevant content for all the “lurkers” out there.

But there is more…

Why Google Buzz is not an anti-Facebook move

Google Buzz launched yesterday. A beautiful product (in our opinion) but according to most Twitterati rather lame. I won’t try explaining what the service does, I’ll let you watch this (less than 2 minute) YouTube movie which explains it all.

Is Google Buzz the Facebook killer? No. Is it a Twitter replacement? Not at all. Will you start using it more than you use your other channels? Probably not. Actually, most certainly not. So it is lame? As a Facebook-killer, Twitter-replacement or attempt to replace your favorite channels? Yes, definitely. But we started this article with mentioning what Google has been up with all along: their search engine. And Google Buzz is about improving search results, adding social results.

A brief recap of recent history:

• Google made its search more realtime by adding instant news and Twitter results as well as updates from platforms as Facebook, MySpace, Friendfeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca.
• Google has its Google Profiles for some time now, enabling every Google user to create an up to date overview/profile of who he is, which services he uses etc. Including the partner services that make the web more realtime. Including the open standard platforms such as Flickr or own platforms such as YouTube.
• FriendConnect, integrated in over 170 million websites, enables people “enhance” and “share” the web on a daily basis easier than ever before. Integrated in Blogger, Joomla and Drupal and growing its features (and presence on sites) every single day.
• Google Social Search (youtube movie) – introduced late 2009 and released January 27, 2010 – makes your search results more social by adding results from your social circle grabbing your connected google friends’ social contents. If you have a Google account, check this page which gives an overview of your connections found directly on Google (only 4 in my case – little friends of mine use gMail apparently or have set up Google Profiles), on the other hand I have set up a Google Profile and linked over 20 social services I use occasionally. Including my Twitter accounts, of which updates are crawled from about 416 people. From those people, friends’ links are indexed and secondary info is found for over 916 additional connections. This makes my social circle a set of about 1336 trusted people/sources. Social circle results appear now on Google Search results.
• UPDATE 11/02: I currently have those figures, after using Google Buzz since yesterday night (< 18 hours).
  
• Google Buzz enables 173 million gMail users (because that is the number of accounts according to Comscore) to get in contact with their social circle’s updates and make the participation inequality’s “sharing audience” of about 15% grow, creating more relevant content, enabling Google to detect better than ever before what a user’s most deepest wishes and intentions are. Enabling their social search to be even better than before, driving traffic to their local search advertisers as Google Buzz is mobile-enabled and creates additional content (to be “shared”, “enhanced” and mainly “lurked at” by all the lurkers out there (déja-vu)).

In short:

Google Buzz is NOT the facebook killer some people want it to be, it is however a very cool social extention to make the web more social and create additional value for its adwords business. Because when we said “Google has been focussed on search results all the time, you can read this as: focussed on advertising value“. Means to an end and stuff…

Google’s Next Move?

Hard to predict.

My two cents? Start social conversations and request for friends’ input from the Google search homepage. If I was looking for a restaurant near Ghent today Google would show me

• local business results,
• pushing those with coupons on top,
• add user opinions from a realtime Twitter search
• add friends’ opinions from my social circle
• and – not to forget – show related adwords next to my search results

What if the next move could be to actively ask my social circle for their opinion, right from within the Google homepage – integrating it perfectly with Google Buzz? Vark.com, prepare to get bought by a Google that wants to launch its “Social Help” feature…

UPDATE: I wrote this article two days ago (wednesday 10/2) and yesterday (11/2), it was announced that Google has bought Vark.com (Aardvark). Or they listened to me, or – more likely – they have been planning this all along, which underlines the theory stated in this argumentation.