Invisible Library Support – Now You Can’t Afford Not to be Social?

If you live by pop tech feed or Twitter, you’ve probably heard that Google is rolling out a new style of socially powered search results. If not, or if you’re still not clear about what it entails, read Phil Bradley’s post on the matter: Why Google Search Plus is a disaster for search.

Done that? If not, why not? This post isn’t likely to make much sense at all if you don’t know the context. Here’s the link again: Why Google Search Plus is a disaster for search

So the starting point for this post is this: Google is in the process of rolling out a new web search service that (optionally) offers very personal search results that contains content from folk that Google thinks you’re associated with, and that Google is willing to show you based on license agreements and corporate politics.

Think about this for a minute…. in e the totally personalised view, folk will only see content that their friends have published or otherwise shared…

In Could Librarians Be Influential Friends?, I wondered aloud whether it made sense for librarians and other folk involved with providing support relating to resource discovery and recommendation to start a) creating social network profiles and encouraging their patrons to friend them, and b) start recommending resources using those profiles in order to start influencing the ordering/ranking of results in patrons’ search results based on those personal recommendations. The idea here was that you could start to make invisible frictionless recommendations by influencing the search engine results returned to your patrons (the results aren’t invisible because your profile picture may appear by the result showing that you recommend it. They’re frictionless in the sense that having made the original recommendation, you no longer have to do any work in trying to bring it to the attention of your patron – the search engines take care of that for you (okay, I know that’s a simplistic view;-). [Hmm.. how about referring to it as recommendation mode support?]

(Note that there is an complementary form of support to the approach which I’ve previously referred to as Invisible Library Tech Support (responsive mode support?; which I guess is also frictionless, at least from the perspective of the patron) in which librarians friend their patrons or monitor generic search terms/tags on Q&A sites and then proactively respond to requests that users post into their social networks more generally.)

With the aggressive stance Google now seems to be taking towards pushing social circle powered results, I think we need to face up to the fact – as Phil Bradley pointed out – that if librarians want to make sure they’re heard by their patrons, they’re going to need to start setting up social profiles, getting their patrons to friend them, and start making content and resource recommendations just anyway in order to make them available as resources that are indexed by patrons’ personal search engines. The same goes for publishers of OERs, academic teaching staff, and “courses”.

If we think of Google social search as searching over custom search engines bound by resources created and recommended by members of a users social circle, if you want to make (invisible) recommendations to a user via their (personalised) web search results, you’re going to need to make sure that the resources/content you want to recommend is indexed by their personal search engines. Which means: a) you need to friend them; and b) you need to share that content/those resources in that social context.

(Hmmm…this makes me think there may be something in the course custom search engine approach after all… Specifically, if the course has a social profile, and recommends the links contained within the course via that profile, they become part of the personalised search index of student’s following that course profile?)

Just by the by, as another example of Google completely messing things up at the moment, I notice that when I share links to posts on this blog via Google+, they don’t appear as trackbacks to the post in question. Which means that if someone refers to a post on this blog on Google+, I don’t know about it… whereas if they blog the link, I do…

See also my chronologically ordered posts on the eroding notion of “Google Ground Truth”.

[Invisible vs frictionless (and various notions of that word) is all getting a bit garbled; see eg @briankelly’s Should Higher Education Welcome Frictionless Sharing and my comments to it for a little more on this…]

PS I’ve been getting increasingly infuriated by the clutter around, and lack of variation within, Google search results lately, so I changed my default search engine to Bing. The results are a bit all over the place compared to the Google results I tend to get, but this may be down in part to personalisation/training. I am still making occasional forays to Google, but for now, Bing is it… (because Bing is not Google…)

PPS Hah – just noticed: Google Search Plus doesn’t mean plus in the sense of search more, it means search Google+, which is less, or minus the wider world view…;-)

PPPS I keep meaning to blog this, and keep forgetting: Turn[ing] off [Google] search history personalization, in particular: “If you’ve disabled signed-out search history personalization, you’ll need to disable it again after clearing your browser cookies. Clearing your Google cookie clears your search settings, thereby turning history-based customizations back on.” WHich is to say, when you disable personalisation, you don’t disable personalisation against your Google account, you disable it only insofar as it relates to your current cookie ID?