Has anybody else been using Googles new +1 feature over the last few days?.. I’ve been experimenting with it and so far I like it.
My main concern is over the validity of the social graph that Google will use when they roll this function out. Facebook’s social profile is far more valuable for recommendations. Gmails connection graph is far too general in nature to take recommendations from people you have emailed once or twice.
What are your thoughts about this new feature and have you been using it?.. If you haven’t heard about it at all yet, you can check out Googles page about it here: Google +1 Button
Hmm, I suspect that will really take off when you can add those buttons to websites. I presume those +1s will appear in search results. Could be very powerful.
I think that Google have gone in the wrong direction with a +1 button, and I think that a lot of people seem to be overemphasising the importance of this to search.
It is very unlikely that Google will adopt +1 into its main search algorithm with much weight. As with the Chrome Site Block extension I feel that Google is simply gathering information from users that are likely to try new tools to increase quality to evaluate their own algorithms against it. For example, when the Chrome plugin was revealed people started blocking the typical link farms en-masse, and inevitably Google used this data to adjust their algorithms to kill off the largest offenders.
Personally, I would prefer to see a -1 button on pages for when they’re NOT helpful, because more often than not people will happily vote up a page that is theirs or is affiliated to them for gain. People have something to lose by using the -1 button, and if a user finds a well-ranked page that is of low-quality I feel that removing low quality pages is more important than voting up high quality pages.
The Google +1 button is simply a way to share search results, ads and web pages with friends.Google’s approach is a pull-referral vs push-referral that Facebook relies on.
I think that the it’s good thinking to introduce such a feature in serp’s but I am worried that spammers can really make misuse of this button in manipulating the search results. I am not sure that whether it will influence the serp’s or not but in some way or another it will definitely have an impact over the total authority of the website.
