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It could be that this is massive, and has little or nothing to do with the US presidential election. They're going to try to force their way into social by grafting social media posts onto the one thing basically everyone uses - the search page.


Or it could be a desire to provide maximally relevant search results. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, Dr. Freud.

Not-a-disclaimer: I'm spending the year at Google (as a visiting scientist; I don't own stock and have no financial interest in its success). You might be surprised by how strong the desire is to do the right thing by users and make it easy for them to find what they're looking for. There's not always an ulterior motive -- happy searchers made Google what it is today.


"Gut gemeint ist das Gegenteil von gut!" German saying! Even with the right motive, you can make - in Googles case: systematic - wrong decisions.


The literal translation is much stronger: "good-intentioned is the opposite of good".


"Hell is paved with good intentions"

1600 Mystic John Ray, later repurposed by Karl Marx.


Happy searchers _and_ AdWords.


To me this seems like the polar opposite of social. There's no conversation, there's no interaction, and there's no involvement for "regular people".

This is just a new ad unit.


This doesn't seem like such a bad idea. I don't care about most of the stuff on Twitter. But, if I'm searching for something and a Tweet-like "post" exists that is relevant to what I'm searching for, I might like that.


>They're going to try to force their way into social by grafting social media posts onto the one thing basically everyone uses - the search page.

Wasn't that the strategy with Google Plus when it came out?


But what makes it more effective than iGoogle wasn't?




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