Google's Social Search

There's been quite a furor since Google announced last week that it would be including personal Google+ results in web searches.  Basically, if you are logged into Google and have a Google+ account, by default your web searches will include hits from your social graph inline with regular search results.

Of course you can shut this off, and "personal" results are denoted with icons and other indicators, but the problem is that this is now the default search mode and apparently it gets turned back on at interval after you've disabled it.  Critics contend that the vast majority of users will never bother to turn it off nor pay much attention to the "personal" indicator – and thus, google's highly tweaked and previously, reasonably-fair search algorithm is broken.

Nice summary and disable-instructions here from Larry Magid.

The bottom line summary is:  until something changes, if you run a business with a web presence, you'd best have a Google+ page set up.