Google announced last week that they’re—wait for it—yes, rolling out another new change to their search results pages. Recognizing the power and popularity of this whole social media phenomenon, they’ve decided to further integrate the social experience. Their desired result is more personalized and trusted search results and happier online searchers. (And world domination, I am sure.)

Here’s how your search results might change:
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• Let’s say you search for a specific restaurant in Chicago and a friend recently wrote a blog post about the horrible service there—because of your connection to her through other networks, that post would be displayed in the search results. You’ll see her link mixed right in with everything else, along with an annotation below the link that you’re seeing this because Sabrina blogged about it. Google sees this as valuable because you’ve just been given insight about the restaurant from a trusted source. Of course, that Sabrina was always such a stickler for service.

• Similarly, if you’re looking for a video that had you laughing so hard you cried, but only really remember the name loosely, and you search for “video with the monkeys and the umbrella,” you may see your friend Bruce’s tweet of the “monkey umbrella video” with the link straight to it. Again, an annotation below that link gives you a head’s up that your trusted friend Bruce tweeted this. This is pretty handy for recalling fun stuff like monkey videos.

• Additionally, Google explains that they’ve granted us more control over the connections we allow in our Google profiles. While we could always publicly connect a Google profile with a Blogger account, we can now do so privately. Basically, they’re trying to give us more opportunity to drive this personalization.

Let the battle of the search engines begin! (again)

This week Google announced it’s new web indexing system called Caffeine. The new system promises to offer even fresher web content than ever before, up to 50% more than the old Google system. The old way of indexing was not in real time as one might have believed, as Google had only been crawling fractions of the web and updating it a batch at a time.  The batch updating created layers of indexed information for the searcher to sift through. Sometimes one of the layers would be refreshed by Google, and others wouldn’t. Needless to say, it wasn’t a perfect system to provide real time content.

Caffeine will change all that, with continuous indexing that will feature new content immediately, fulfilling the consumer want for their news “now” as it’s happening. From here on out, Google will immediately show breaking news stories in real time, photo updates, social media updates and more. Here is Google’s visual representation of the indexing change:

So why would Google do such a thing? What if we don’t like change? Well, it’s a good change that works in our favor. One of the main reasons for the update is to capture all the continuous new content being generated on the web, and that includes content generated by you and me. Not convinced? We posted when Google and Twitter agreed to “date” so check out the real time Twitter scroll now on a search results page:

Caffeine’s system will allow Google to index content on a much larger scale at a faster pace than ever before, stepping up its game against the other search engines. And if that wasn’t enough excitement for you, Google promises even more updates in the coming months!
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