Google is giving Google+ users two enhanced ways to find information disseminating across the social network, with real-time search and hashtags.
“Now when you search in Google+, you’ll see a message about new posts the instant they’re available,” Vic Gundotra, Google’s SVP of social, explained in a post on Google+ Wednesday. “If you click on this message, or select ‘Most recent,’ then relevant posts will start appearing in real-time.”
Traffic to Google+ spiked 1,200% in the first few days following its public launch Sept. 20, but has since plummeted by 60%, according to a report from a data analytics company.
Chitika tracked Google+ traffic before and after the social networking service opened its gates to all users.
“The data shows that, on the day of its public debut, Google+ traffic skyrocketed to peak levels. But, soon after, traffic fell by over 60% as it returned to its normal, underwhelming state,” Chitika says of its findings, as illustrated in the chart below.
Which site offers more privacy, Facebook or Google Plus? A pretty good comparison between the two appears in an infographic below.
Peer One Hosting created the infographic that illustrates how neither site outdoes the other in the way of privacy.
After opening its doors to the public last Tuesday, Google+ may now have more than as 43 million users.
So says Ancestry.com co-founder and Google+ unofficial statistician Paul Allen, who’s been keeping a running tally of how big the social network is growing.
What a day. In the space of a few short hours, Google+ wrenched open the floodgates, allowing anyone to sign up for the fledgling social network — while Facebook retooled its newsfeed so you won’t miss any of your friend’s vital updates.
Google+ managed to out-announce Facebook by a wide margin. The search giant offered a slew of new Google+ features, such as turning Hangouts into a bona fide broadcast platform. The search giant even added–you guessed it–search to the service.
For those of you not in Google+, which is most of you, this is a very big deal. Google+ has, by some measures, almost 20 million users and no way of finding anything. I have no idea why Google waited to introduce search until Google+ was out of the hands of Google’s more trusted Web cognoscenti’ audience. We could have debugged it for them. The company also managed to bury the lead, putting the fact that registration for Google+ is now open to the masses near the end of its announcement.
Steer your way to Google.com and you’ll find yourself staring at perhaps its boldest Doodle yet. No, Google hasn’t outdone itself with another musical tribute or interactive game — it’s running an ad directing users to try out Google+. But this isn’t just your average text ad or banner: Google’s drawing a big, blue arrow that points toward your Google+ name on the left side of its top nav bar. Click it, and you’ll launch into the Google+ homepage and signup process.
Do you still consider yourself a noob when it comes to Google’s social platform? If so, we’ve got some handy hints to help you out.
From quicker sharing options to better content curation via savvy privacy settings, we’re bringing you 10 tips and tricks that will soon have you Google Plussing like a pro.
Google has added a feature that allows users to share directions, hotel information and other content from Google Maps to its social network, Google+.
Specifically, Google has added support for +snippets in Maps. +Snippets, which rolled out in August, adds a link, description and thumbnail to whatever webpage you want to share to Google+. When you click on the “Share” button on the black Google+ bar, the share will be populated with a description and image.
Shane Snow is co-founder of Contently.com, an “agile publishing” platform for brands-turned-publishers and freelance journalists.
Old school SEO pros cover your ears, or be prepared to adapt your craft: Search engines are changing, and social media is a huge part of that change.
Bing, Google, and an increasing swath of nimble little search engines like Blekko and DuckDuckGo are incorporating social data into their results. This is potentially great news for new businesses trying to achieve visibility in search. It’s less great news for sites that rely heavily on link buying (illegal, but hard to catch), producing huge volumes of borderline-useless content (long-tail, content farm approach), or just really old domains (previously an SEO trump card).
If communication barriers on Google+ got you down, never fear. Google has released a tool to ensure that updates from its international user base can be easily translated.
Google Translate for Google+, released Monday, is a simple browser extension for Chrome that translates posts and comments into more than 50 languages.
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