Google Customizing Search Results with Google Plus User Preferences

Trends of Internet usage are changing at a very rapid pace. From once being content and e-mail oriented, the Internet evolved as a medium to express oneself through blogs and personal websites. Interconnecting with like-minded users through social networking websites and online communities was the next step, while the future of the Internet is going to lie within the concept of its customization for each user in a manner absolutely unique to him or her.

Google.com has announced that it is going to begin scanning the personal photographs and comments made by the users of its booming social network, known as Google (News - Alert) Plus; which will enable it to know the preferences of the users in a better way. Further, these choices and preferences will be leveraged to offer more personal information in the Internet searches made by the users.

The company has now initiated its efforts towards realizing one of its most important aims, which is getting more personalized for each user when it comes to searching the Internet. Google believes it will soon be able to acquire adequate databases of personal information about the users of its social network, which will enable it in customizing the search results according to the unique interests of each person looking for something.

The Google Plus social network had been launched around six months back with an aim to combat the increasing popularity of the social networking giant Facebook.com, and the online short messaging service Twitter.com.

With the new development, Google has begun importing data from Google Plus database for inclusion into Internet search, which will offer different search results to different Google user for the same search terms. Additionally, the image search results of Google will also begin giving higher preference to the pictures uploaded through Picasa, its online image sharing service.

Both Facebook (News - Alert) and Twitter don’t allow the Google search engine to access their huge databases of pictures, comments, pages and links submitted by their users. It had consistently been causing a worry to Google as the inability of its search engine to know what the Internet users of today are thinking and preferring was hindering the company from offering results that might contextually be more relevant to its users.

With an aim to equip itself with a larger database of the preferences and likings of its users, Google has launched the new feature known as “Search, plus Your World.” The feature has automatically been enabled for all the English-language searches made by users logged into Google. If a user wants to turn off the personal results permanently, he or she will have to change a setting in the search engine’s personal preferences for doing that. Alternatively, the user can also click on an icon of the globe on the results page to filter the personalized results out on a search-by-search basis.

Earlier this month, it was reported that Google has been expanding its patent portfolio by buying IBM (News - Alert) patents, as well as acquiring other companies; and the company has so far purchased over 1000 IBM patents with over 200 added in late December.

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