January is always the dawn of a new year with new possibilities. The Consumer Electronics Show from Las Vegas dazzles us with the latest technology available and on the market and Google potentially completely opens up the privacy of all its users with new policies under a personalised search initiative called SPY World, or more discretely Search Plus Your World. While there are numerous articles online regarding Google possibly becoming the modern equivalent of George Orwell’s 1984 “Big Brother”, I’d like to analyse more the implications of how SPYW affects digital marketing in regards to strategy and reach of efforts already in place by social media and SEO agencies. The premise of SPYW is the melding of the search giant with its fledgling social media platform Google Plus to create an integrated system that provides users with a user centric search algorithm that changes the results heavily dependent on the user.

Firstly, the integration of Google’s own social media initiative into search results has heightened tension between itself and social media forerunners, Twitter and Facebook. Twitter has publicly announced a “concern” for the personalised results, believing the preference given would affect the search results of users in a negative manner. Google has stated that the SPYW results are an addition and not a replacement at all to users’ results but it can be seen to be conceivable that Google Plus content may appear higher in ranking results than that of Facebook or Twitter. The consequences for social media agencies are that existing endeavours with Facebook pages and Twitter accounts may need to be diminished in favour of augmenting Google Plus initiatives, a big win for Google in the social media industry.

Google’s personalised search algorithm may also mismatch ranking reports and researched data with user experiences as the preferences of each individual user cannot be gauged in order to perfect page optimisations to obtain the maximum traffic and ROI. This incomplete understanding of user preferences means a larger variable in strategies and potential user backlash in regards to the personalised changes may mean the market fragmentation of search engine choice, of which Google holds a distinct majority, can affect strategies as well. Professionals in the digital marketing industry are starting to take more notice of Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, as being a simpler and purer essence of results from the changed Google system. In resistance to the changes, users can turn off personalised search options and even use the created “Focus on the User” plugin for Chrome, Firefox and IE which replaces the Google + extra results with those from Foursquare, Twitter and Facebook, amongst other social media platforms. While Google has claimed that Facebook and Twitter data was difficult to source, this plugin has dispelled this claim.

The true extent of the changes will only be felt by digital marketing agencies in following months after rankings changes are noticeable. Whether the update will shift the search engine market or agencies choices in social media platforms remains to be seen.

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