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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