Not to be deterred by the growing influence of Facebook due to extensive social graph it creates with the “Like” button, Google has recently launched it’s owned version of a recommendation engine.
This is interesting because Google’s recommendation engine is not merely for sharing with friends on a single SNS, but it becomes an open platform for consumers to share recommendations which shows up in a search engine results page (SERP). Search by itself is already a powerful tool, because of the relevancy of the results in relation to the search keywords. However, these are all based on Google’s perspective of what is relevant. Moving forward, search results will be taking a greater leap of relevancy – by using users’ recommendations.
Consider SEO friendly sites, that optimize for the sole purpose of getting consumers to click through to their site in hope of driving huge amounts of traffic. Relevancy is only on the surface, and consumers usually do not get what they are looking for. Now, useful sites will get the thumbs up from users, in turn giving the search algorithm a signal that this site is found useful by many users. This would really help to surface and uncover many hidden gems that have possibly so far been buried in SERP due to poor SEO.
Looking forward to seeing how this will play out in the future.
