Why Google entered to the social network competition?
Wish all my friends a nice week :) I couldn't write anything
in the last couple of days since I was on a trip with my office colleagues. I
returned back to my home yesterday and tried to recall what I have been
planning to write, but I have forgotten them all.
Anyway, I read through my blog posts once again and I
remembered that I wanted to tell something about Google+ as well. So here I am
posting another idea. Remember, as usual this is also going to be only an idea,
this may not be the real reasons, and these are just what I am thinking and
what I see.
Alright, Google+ (plus) is not a new thing for many of us
now. And we know that it is the social network site launched by Google. Luckily
I was an early bird to use it. At the beginning I was also there among the
people who thought that this time will also be another failed attempt of
Google. I had a reason to think so. In the earliest period where they
introduced Google+, apparently there were no active users. And everybody felt
the usual boredom of an empty site. After a few months what Google+ did was
they automatically created many circles for me, and automatically added around
thousand of active users to my circles. Then only I felt that this is good
place to hang out. Actually what I noticed was that Google was not ready to
easily put away all their efforts this time. Google+ is a great social
community with some of the best features and it was clearly seen that they have
put a very big effort in developing it. So it was worth for them to try
everything possible to make it successful. And ultimately they did it.
Google+ was not the
first attempt of Google to launch a social site. There were few tries before,
but unfortunately they could not achieve a success like their last attempt,
Google+.
Google is a giant in the internet. Undoubtedly it is the
number 01 site (according to the Alexa rank). Their main product is Google
search and besides that they offer dozens of other online services. Hence it is
worth to speak about why Google needed to launch a social site? Do they want to
compete with facebook? Or do they think that facebook is becoming a threat to
them? Well, I do not know. But I see something behind everything. It is to not
to compete with facebook or twitter, but to make their Google search more
effective.
If you wonder what I am going to write today, it is this. We
have been talking about
blogger, Google search, and most the important thing, Google Adsense. Also
we noticed the common link in between them. The personalized
search results and advertisements. It is very clear that every other
feature they introduced was to tweak the effectiveness of Google search
results. That means they wanted to provide the exact search results which the user
wanted to see.
Ex: Suppose you are a php web developer and you do a Google
search for the term “new trends in Web development”. We know that there are
many web development programming languages around, and probably Google will
show results relevant for each and every of them like php, perl, Ruby, Python,
Java, asp and so on. So you will find it is difficult to find the results
relevant for PHP (Since you have not mentioned about PHP in your query).
Now consider the same incidence, but now Google knows that
you are a PHP web developer (by any means. Let’s see how they get to know it
later). And now when you do a Google search for the term “new trends in Web
development”, Google will understand that you are interested only in PHP and
hence they will give the priority to results that match with PHP and drop the
results for other languages. See the difference. Now you will see a bunch of
interesting search results at the top (all the PHP stuff will come on top). You
do not need to dive through the search results list to find results match your
query.
I hope now you understood the importance of Google’s
personalized search results.
Right, If Google doesn’t want to compete with other sites like Facebook and twitter, why they introduced Google+? The main reason as I see is, by having a social community like Google+, Google can collect personal data of its users more effectively. That means Google will have access to a lot more information about you than what they have collected from storing cookies on computer, or reading what you have searched earlier.
It is a usual thing that we all update our name, location, education, and the occupation in a social community website. These are very important things for Google. Say, by retrieving your previous queries, they cannot exactly predict who you are or what is your occupation or the location. In the meantime, advertisers find these data useful when it comes to the adsense. They will consider many factors when advertising a product. For example, there is no use in advertising a book about chemistry for a person who has a very low educational level. He / She will not care about the advertisement, and hence it is a waste of money and time.
How Google collect information about you from google+?
Answer is really simple. They collect and analyze everything
you do in Google+.
Have you ever used Google communities? If so, you would have
seen that Google+ suggests you communities, and they are all about the subjects
you are interested in.
Here is my suggestions page.
How did they get to know about my subjects that I am interested
in? Well, I studied science for my advanced level, and Google+ has suggested me
a community about science (Probably they get to know this from my search
history). Cool, I have an Android device and the second community is about
android. This is great, I do search about android a lot using Google, and also
I use Google Play store. Well, Then it is true that Google use all these
collected data across all their Google products. All the other suggestions are
similar.
Also Google stores about the posts you are plussing (Post
you +1) and about the people you are adding to your circles. These things are
really good hints about you to Google.
We know that even in our society, people measure you from
the friends you have :). So be careful about people you are following :D
I hope I have discussed everything I wanted, and finally the
conclusion is Google introduced Google+ to collect information about their
users. That is why Google forces each and everyone who are using other Google
products to use Google+. The best example is Blogger. They converted the
Blogger profiles into Google+ profiles. These are clear things and I have discussed
only about what I see and what I think. You are free to comment about my
thought. And I look forward to hear your ideas…
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