In my post about Google releasing search plus your world I mentioned that Google is a Filter Bubble. Since then a few people have asked me about that so I thought I would post something here by way of explanation. The Filter Bubble is a book that I am currently reading all about how the information that comes into our world is tightly controlled by the bubble that things like Google and Facebook provide us. My experience of Google and Facebook is different to yours and we have no control over this. Anyway, it is a great book and I would highly recommend you check it out. You can get it on their website.

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Customer service is easy to do when things are going well. I think it is when things go wrong that companies really show their true colours.

Recently one of the tools (Market Samurai) that we use here at Small Acorns started to have a few problems. Pretty much all of the functionality stopped working or was severely crippled. This problem was totally outside of their control as it was a change at Google that caused them the problem but one of the first things they did was alert their users to the problem going into great detail about what the probelem is, what they were doing to fix the problem.

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Google have continued to (somewhat aggressively) integrate their Google+ social network into the search results by the release of Search Plus Your World. You can read the official blog post but the video below will give you the essentials.

This move has been seen by some as a massive anti-trust lawsuit waiting to happen as there are noticeable absences from social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, where as others have said that it is a genuine attempt by Google to provide us with the most relevant search results - after all, don't we want to see results from people in our social circles? I guess here lies the problem - most people's social circles don't, at this point in time, include Google+ but do include Twitter and Facebook. I think Google could have done better here if they wanted to provide users with the best experience possible.

One thing that is clear is that it will become increasingly difficult to determine a sites ranking in the search engines what a business then does socially with affect how they appear in the new Search Plus Your World. Also, Google has, in one sweeping move, made the Filter Bubble even more encompassing by integrating so fully with search. Information organised by who I am connected to instead of authority and relevance might not give me the most useful results.

It is certainly going to be interesting to see how this plays out.

In this Google Webmaster video, Matt Cutts talks about whether we should allow dofollow comments on our blogs. Allowing dofollow means that any links on our comments will pass page rank to the page that is linked to. Page rank is part of the algorithm that Google uses to determine the ranking of a webpage. Dofollow and nofollow were created to try and stamp out comment spam on the web where a spammer would post thousands of comments with links to their spam sites. It seems from this video Google may not be apply penalties to blogs that have dofollow comments.