Behold Google’s latest change to the search results: Search Plus Your World. Now when you search on Google, you’ll be shown results from the public web as well as content that has been shared with you privately. This is only available however to users signed in to Google.com and searching in English.

Search plus Your World involves three new features introduced by Google:

• Personal Results – this finds information specifically for you ex.) Google+ photos and posts. This includes not just your own but also those shared with you that only you will be able to see on your results page.
• Profiles in Search – both in autocomplete and results; this would enable you to quickly find people you are friends with or people you may be interested in following.
• People and Pages – this would help you to find profiles and Google+ pages  related to a specific topic or interest, and enable you to follow them in just a few clicks.

By default, you will be shown the Personal Results view i.e. search results based on your behaviour and social connections. However you will also be able to see what your search results look like without personal content via a toggle, as shown below:

This new addition will largely benefit those involved in search engine optimization as it allows you to switch between personalised and unpersonalised results. Unpersonalised will not provide results from your friends, private information or any personalization based on your Web History.

Obviously there are a number of security concerns but Google has informed us that any information provided by signed in users is secured by SSL encryption. Therefore protecting your search results which includes private content by the same high standards of encryption as your messages in Gmail.

Currently, Search Plus Your World does not cover any other social network where content is shared such as Facebook, Twitter or Flickr. In other words, Search Plus Your World is currently only displaying content from Google+. It will be interesting to see whether or not Facebook allows Google to start using their content despite already partnering with Bing. This would allow them to personalise its search results based on a searcher’s Facebook friends’ likes.

Will this enhance your experience whilst searching on Google? Let me know your thoughts.