Google+ Gets Big Push With New “Search Plus Your World” Feature

Google+, Google’s six-month-old social network, is getting a huge push with

today’s announcement of “Search, Plus Your World” – a dramatic change to Google’s search results.

With “Search, Plus Your World” (let’s call it SPYW going forward), Google will begin polling more content from Google+ (and photos from Picasa) into its main search results: content shared with you — even privately! — on Google+, content that you’ve shared there, Google+ user profiles and Google+ pages, too.

Google has also added a new toggle button that lets users turn the SPYW results on or off.

Today’s announcement is the latest step in Google’s heavy push and commitment to Google+. Last summer, Chairman Eric Schmidt suggested that “everything [at Google] will move over to using the + infrastructure.” Google+ content has been showing up more often in Google’s search results since then. Google+ has also been integrated with Gmail, YouTube and numerous other Google products. And the company has done some high-profile TV ads to promote Google+.

Is it working? Well, Hitwise research a week ago showed that Google+ had its biggest traffic month yet in December.

Over at our sister site, Search Engine Land, Danny Sullivan has a very in-depth look at today’s announcement, including potential privacy and competition concerns that it may raise:

Google’s Results Get More Personal With “Search Plus Your World”

There’s also a lot of coverage on Techmeme.