Search Goes Social

Now that you can add yourself to Google’s search results (as a profile link) when someone does a search on your name, what does that mean for advertising?

It means search has gone social or rather social media is now exerting a downward influence on search (and also display), and so Google has to define what it means to index the Web more broadly as pages and media and people, including the conversations people are having.

Today a search on “brooks jordan” only gives you one link to a profile that I’ve created (at the bottom of the page, and only if you’re logged into your Google account), which in itself feels like big change, but tomorrow it will be possible to do a more complex, multi-word search and expose my social graph and your social graph (i.e., connections and conversations).

It’s going to be us, after all, that are recommending products, people, and things, and whoever can expose those relationships in an unbiased way will be able to forget about the pretty much undifferentiated CPM and take CPC, CPA, and CPE to a new level.

If marketing has now become a game of relationshps, and individual people are best at playing it, then search, to have value, has to be social (as well as an index of information).