Google’s new “plus one” button for web sites is an interesting development and potentially a game changer – if done well. I’ve seen a few commentators calling this an attempt by Google to go the Social Media route. And it is, at first blush, out of the Social Media canon. Facebook and Twitter both have their ways to generate page-specific responses, for example. Google has previously tried user-specific engagement with tools like SideWiki, the Search Wiki and Stars. Google uses Google Toolbars to understand things about user interaction with actual web pages, as well as what the robots tell it. But that’s as far as it has got – the SideWiki and in-search commentary. Until this week.
What is the Plus One Button for websites?
It’s a small piece of Javascript to insert on web pages that are candidates for Google Search Results. On each page, you need to refer to the JavaScript file, and then invoke the script.
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js”></script>
<g:plusone></g:plusone>
As you can see from the brevity of this code, it has no idea *who* has dropped the link, other than someone with authority to modify the site. This is in strong contrast to Facebook, where the ID is an integral part of adding “Like” buttons. The implication is that Google doesn’t care who drops the code – they care who clicks on the button it displays, and probably, they care more about which page was clicked.
Click on the icon that the code displays, and your ID is added to the list of users that are interested in this page – and the icon changes from white to blue, to indicate that you have clicked it. If you “Plus One’d” a page, then it gets marked in the search results, as shown above. Note that the tooltip is not changed – when you +1 a result, the tooltip still shows that you should click to recommend the page, but that will actually remove the recommendation. Probably a transient oversight at Google, rather than intentional.
Here’s this very article, towards the bottom of Google search results for “Google plus one for websites”, before anybody I know had “plus one’d” the page:
You can see that I’ve +1′d the page. It shows up under the listing, below the URI, and it knows that I’ve voted – but gives no clue how many *others* have clicked. At the point that this was taken, there were a handful of +1s for the article that were at least an hour old.
It appears to take at least fifteen minutes for the “plus one” information to be updated in search results. I have to admit that I became bored checking – so somewhere after 30 minutes and before four hours, the search results had added a friend, who I’d ask to make a timestamp-noted entry. This is *much* slower than the update to the count of “plus ones” shown on the page – that count changed in seconds. I’ll guess that the delay before turning up in search results is to add the social graph data of who I know that has clicked, so my search results pages show data about people I know. I suspect that this process takes some time… so if you’ve just put up a post and emailed your mates to +1 it, don’t be surprised if you see on-page activity a long time (internet time) before the Search Results update to reflect that.
Amusingly, while I was checking to see who else that I know had used a plus one on an article about a plus one (interesting behavioural change – I went looking *much* further into results – will others look deeper to see if their friends have marked stuff, and will that be a transient behaviour until the SERPs behaviour becomes clearer?)… I found that the preview had updated to include the latest summary within the article and the clip showing the position. Here, recursively, is this article showing a clip of Google showing a preview of this article showing a clip of Google’s search results showing this article…
The implication is that Google snatches previews at the time of interest and marks them up, as a much faster process than the social data is updated. Now… Why is the social data apparently slowed so much, relative to the preview? I don’t know, and I’ll be thinking about that for a while.
What Failed Before, and Will The Plus One Also Fail?
Failures aren’t the worst thing that can happen. Failures tell you when you aren’t doing the right thing. So long as you don’t do something that kills the business, you can learn from failures. A failure to learn from the lessons you should be learning from a failure, now that is a real failing.
What has Google tried before, and why didn’t they work? And are there lessons from those attempts about what would make Google’s “Plus One” work, or be yet another fail marker?
Google’s SideWiki
Perhaps the most comprehensive attempt to solicit users’ direct feedback on a page or a business, is the Google SideWiki. This is barely known about, even in search engine marketing circles, much less by the wider public. It lets any user add an annotation to a web page. If the web master knows about the SideWiki, they can respond… But I can’t recall ever talking to a webmaster who knew about SideWiki before I mentioned it, much less ordinary web users.
The problems for SideWiki are quite large. There’s no on-page presence (if you have the toolbar or Chrome, there’s a minor marker in the decoration frame for a web page, but nothing in the area that users focus on). The SideWiki is intended to be present even for sites that don’t want to participate – which is why it has such a peripheral vision presence. It’s a parallel web space so only the search geeks or the deeply aggrieved find their way on to it. Parallel page specific annotations are a rich source of information for Google, with a user indication of liking or not liking the content, and it can provide a parallel stream of keywords and some clues as to the importance of a site or page (e.g. the Apple home page has a lot more SideWiki comments than the Twitter home page – working out why that is meaningful is left as an exercise for the reader! Try using the SideWiki for this page to discuss this? Your attempt to use it may partially explain why it has been so little used and known.)
Considering Google’s first rule in their Ten Things (“Focus on the User and all else will follow”), I’d have to call SideWiki a brave, but doomed, effort. Collecting additional data on page value is a great idea. But doing it in a way that users aren’t aware of, and can’t possibly comprehend, without a marketing information campaign to support it, and proper tools to engage with it for site owners and regular users – well, it’s destined to be roadkill. SideWiki is, I suspect, a victim of Google’s Engineering Lead business philosophy – a fallacy supported by the success of their first effort in this space, Google’s technologically and philosophically profound switch in ranking the results in search engines.
The “Engineering Lead Marketing Fallacy” is that if you make a great product, people will find and use it – but the reality is that if you have something good, you need to educate, inform and persuade users that it is good; this may be a rich vein for another article on another day, though; just think about Sun, until I write that article. I’m deeply familiar with this fallacy, having been a techie myself, before my Damascene conversion.
Google Stars
In Google Search Results, you can “star” a listing. This means that it is a page that you like. Starred listings are preferentially popped up to the top of your results pages. Like SideWiki, that is great feedback for Google on pages that work well for users. Pages that are well liked should get lots of stars – an easy way for Google to automatically find the hot stuff and the useful stuff. They are directly related to Google’s Bookmarks service – and social bookmarking is one of the unsung other keys of Social Media (it used to be sung, back when delicious was new).
Why doesn’t “Google Stars” work? When I talk to users they haven’t noticed the little faint outline of a star, or couldn’t be bothered to work out what it might mean. This star is an unusual icon, faint, and unexplained. Only the most curious users work out what it is for. And Google does their best to make sure that users *won’t* engage directly with the Google Star. That may be a surprising statement, but you have to consider the user experience (UX) when considering why the Star doesn’t and can’t work very well to deliver user feedback.
What’s Google’s proud claim and ambition (number 3 in the ten things)? That they deliver the best page of search results so you spend as little time as possible on Google. This does not encourage users to spend time investigating the details of search results. Any system that Google develops that requires time to parse the page, infer meaning and interact with the results, is counter to that (so far) successful formula of reducing the time spent looking at Google’s own search results rather than looking at the content that you wanted to find. Because of this emphasis on shifting people off the search results page as quickly as possible, Google Stars will be a minor “also ran” in terms of soliciting feedback, but probably slightly more effective than the almost invisible SideWiki.
As a subset of this mechanism, is Google’s “spam marking” annotation. Same problem. I find out that the page is spammy when I’ve been to it. When I use search (rather than being an SEO and staring at search results for ages to inder why Google does what it does), my attention is not on cleaning up after Google’s spam cleaning efforts, but on getting to the page that helps me do whatever it is I’m doing. So the user focus is not, at the time of looking at the page, focused on the question “is this spammy?”; anything as onerous as a check box, is too onerous to work with and is inappropriate within the normal context of a user interaction with search.
Effectively using the Star or Spam Marking within Google Search Results means having to return to Google, perhaps rekeying the search, and the user doing so while intending to mark a result as being annoying. Too much effort for most people. You’d have to *really* hate a web page to take that much effort. Or remember that if you are using Chrome, you can use the faint star at the right hand edge of the input box (URL/search field) to Bookmark/+1/Star the page you are on.
Google’s Search Wiki
Wikis are great, for certain classes of problem at least. The previous version of our company main site was written using a search engine optimised wiki we developed in 1994 and ran until a catastrophic incident in late 2010, but that’s a story for another time…. The point was that a Wiki collects lots of stuff, organise it and let users inside and outside the company work on it.
Google used to use a Wiki in search results. Google’s SearchWiki was effectively another parallel web – another Google system that had potentially one web page for every web page out there. This was before the success of Facebook, when MySpace was still a power online. SearchWiki looks like “Social”, smells a bit like “Social” – and it failed. There’s no sign of the user generated content attached to search listings any more. I think this experiment fell foul of the same problem that afflicts Google Stars – but even more so. The problem being that users on a search page don’t want to interact with the search page, they want to go to a useful web page. The Wiki compounded that problem by making the interaction into an essay. Users like simple UI choices – “do I like this page”, “do I like this company”, “do I never want to see this again”? Only a tiny fraction of users like writing essays. More prefer 140 character limits (c.f. Twitter) and more yet prefer just a “Like” button.
Google Plus One
There have been a few other attempts by Google to get users to interact about sites and web pages. They’ve all, to my knowledge, been variations of the above themes – hidden content in a parallel web or user engagement in search results pages. Note that user engagement does work when well done – Google’s own search results are a partially a consequence of user engagement with the content (title, snippet, URL and the actual site all play a part, as does the user interaction with all of those). The failure is not in the effort to engage users, but in the absence of the first rule (“Focus On The User”) in the interaction models – I believe these exercises have been focused on improving search results for all users, at the expense of focus on the individual user as contributor. Clicking a “Like” button, or a “Plus One” button, is a contribution – it’s just non-textual.
Google’s Plus One Button is different from all these previous efforts though. It’s on the web site, not the search results. It’s where users are focused when they are doing something. I think it is the first thing that Google has done, probably since they invented the whole idea of Page Rank, likely to actively engage with user opinion. This is a markedly different activity from any effort so far. But will it work?
So long as the interaction model is kept to a minimum (“I like this and would want to see it again” as a checkbox) and on the page that the user is considering, and if it turns up in search results (“you liked this page when you saw it”), it’s reasonably good.
The idea that I’ll know that people I know have marked a page – that’s good, too, and that puts it closer to the Social Media space. Knowing that someone I respect likes a page, helps me to decide that I want to visit that page too. This may have a profound effect on SEO – and given that user preferences are having increasing importance in ranking, who’d care to bet that this won’t also become yet another Google AdWords Extension – allowing you to advertise more visibly when you have a preferred page in the listings?
What will stop “Plus One” from working?
Several things can stop “Plus One” from working:
- A good distraction from FaceBook and LinkedIn or GroupOn. Distract people from paying attention to “Plus One” when it is new, so that webmasters focus on some other issue to deal with.
- Google’s Engineering Fallacy – just because this is probably the best interaction model so far devised for improving search engine results, doesn’t mean that it will win. It needs marketing and communication efforts. It needs Matt Cutts to write about it and encourage webmasters to embed it. It needs the Webmaster Tools guys to make space for it and report the results in WMT. It needs to actively let webmasters know when their sites are loved (and relatively unloved – like Google Analytics Benchmarking data). And most of all it needs to be social – I *care* when Bill Slawski, or RustyBrick (Barry Schwartz), or Kim Clinks like a web page. I don’t care when it’s some random Joe (unless there’s several thousand real random Joe’s, because that has its own message about a page).
- It needs to be non-spammy. Google has mechanisms to understand whether real users are interacting; the votes should probably use the same kinds of invalid click detection systems used in AdWords and Search Results. However, reporting to those to webmasters may need the same kind of obfuscation that conceals exactly which clicks were invalid, in AdWords, to continue the security-through-obscurity approach used in click fraud detection mechanisms.
At the moment, I don’t see how how I respond to a friend Plus-one-ing a page. So it is limited in terms of social media. I can like, or not. I can’t interact. Unlike Facebook, where I can comment on something that someone has found. That may yet prove to be the greatest weakness. Being able to see my friends liking something – that’s good. Being unable to respond and correspond, a core weakness.
And the name… I can easily grasp “liking” a page. But “Plus One-ing” it? Smells geeky, even nerdy. Hard to say. Hard to write. Hard to put into a grammatically correct page unless treated as an adjectival-noun thingie.
Is there any sign that Google Gets Marketing Communications?
A bit. But the most prominent usage of the “Plus 1″ graphic on the announcement page is just a link to the giant graphic, not a way to plus one the plus one announcement… That’s hidden with the other social markers below the article – and not even first in the list. Placement itself means something. Come on, Google guys – you rank stuff by importance. If you put “plus 1″ towards the end of the list of social markers, how important is it? Learn, for goodness’ sake, from your experience.
I’ll probably update this section as I see signs of life-after-engineering. When I see some type of audience communication rather than simply an announcement.
Summary
Good effort, but not enough, yet, to be completely convincing.
Possibly worth getting your braver clients to sign up and see what happens.
More important for Google’s de-spamming of search results than for social interaction.
May fail, because it is only partially social – no response mechanism to friends.
Where’s the social list drawn from? Ah. Now that’s an interesting question… for later.
Potentially disruptive – but not clearly so.
Could be emulated, perhaps better, by Bing using Facebook’s social graph and their Like button data. How? Well, if Bing did this, then made a “plus 1″ boost results for a while, “until the algorithm settles down”, then SEOs would want to get a Bing button everywhere and people to click on them – and that would probably help clean up Bing results, increase Bing usage, and is another reminder on web pages of Bing’s presence in some markets (still just an also-ran, here in the UK). So, disruptive but not exclusive… and open to a competitor taking it higher, further, faster.
So – what’s it like? See this…
… and do, please, click it. :)
