Google will be rolling out a new like button for search engine results. So now when you search for things online and you are logged in with your Google account, you can see friends and contact that have “liked” websites in your search results.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/1s-right-recommendations-right-when-you.html
Website owners will soon be able to add these +1 buttons to their own websites just like you can currently add a Like button. Google even went on to talk about how they will use the likes to determine future search engine rankings:
“Over the coming weeks, we’ll add +1 buttons to search results and ads on Google.com. We’ll also start to look at +1’s as one of the many signals we use to determine a page’s relevance and ranking, including social signals from other services. For +1′s, as with any new ranking signal, we’ll be starting carefully and learning how those signals affect search quality over time.”
Additional articles on the +1 button:
- http://www.google.com/+1/button/
- http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/03/introducing-1-button.html
- http://searchengineland.com/meet-1-googles-answer-to-the-facebook-like-button-70569
It will be interesting to see how quickly people start to use these buttons and how much of an affect it will have on search engine rankings. I am not sure how much I will personally be +1′ing things (except for testing for clients), but it may cut down on some frustration of visiting sites that are just terrible. And with the +1 button if I go to a recommend site and it is terrible, at least I know which one of my friends to call out on liking a terrible website.
