Changes in 2012 for Google Search

2012 is going to be an awesome year for search as it starts to become social. But I’ll get to that in the later part of the post.

Here are some of the things/changes that I expect to see happening this year.

First Real Time Search will make a return. Google used to have realtime which was powered by Twitters Firehose. This firehose was a direct connection to Twitter that Google used to pay for so they could analyze trends and searches instantly which was really useful for breaking news. Google can still crawl Twitter as it currently does but it’s a lot slower and limited than the realtime direct connection it had. Google ended the contract early last year and real time search vanished. With the rise of Google+ and the plus one button expect to see a return of realtime but this time powered by Google+. Once this happens it will make the plus one button even more important.

The browser on Android is borrowing more and more code and features from Google Chrome. Soon Google Chrome will have it’s own Android browser version and will be on every Android. With the continued rise of smartphones and Android mobile search will continue to explode. Everything is going mobile.

2012 will be the year we see the Google Plus button intergrated by default into Google Chrome and every Android Phone. With 700,000 Androids activated every day and Google Chrome to become the biggest browser this summer over taking IE’s top spot that’s a lot of people with the plus one button.

Now back to the main thing which is Social Search. This will be the most important part of search in 2012 as search results start to become influenced by your friends and likes. I’m personally as a regular Google+ user starting to see it affect my Google+ results. Sites I plus one or my followers plus one are starting to appear higher up the rankings. As more join Google plus the importance and impact of social search will grow. It’s just starting to explode as it’s members jumped 25% in December as it just passed 60 million and is expected by some analysts to reach 400 million by the end of the year which is amazing when compared to Facebook which has 800 million after a much longer time. If you use the new version of Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools you’ll see how the plus one is affecting your click through rate so you can actually see it starting to impact on your organic traffic to your site.

Whatever 2012 brings, search will change. Change is inevitable as nothing stands still on the internet.