Google is taking on Facebook's Like Button with a button of its own, the +1 Button.
"Our goal at Google is to get you the most relevant results as quickly as possible," Rob Spiro, a Google product manager, wrote in a blog post Wednesday. "But relevance is about relationships as well as words on webpages. That's why we recently started to include more information from people you know -- stuff they've shared on Twitter, Flickr and other sites -- in Google search results.
Plus One will initially only be accessible to 2% of Google's English-language users in the US, but it will be seen as a rival to Facebook's increasingly ubiquitous 'Like' tool which appears on hundreds of thousands of third-party sites.
Appearing as a small icon next to each search result and text ad, logged-in users can share their recommendations with contacts through their Gmail address book, Google Reader and Buzz contacts and, eventually, Twitter contacts. Google would not comment on whether Facebook contacts could eventually be integrated.
Google is characterising Plus One as a different function to Facebook's Like, saying that recommendations are only shared within the context of relevant searches, rather than spamming all contacts. Social is widely seen as the next generation of web services, but Plus One will also begin to influence the ranking of sites within search results listings. Users will be able to choose for recommended sites to be more visible in search results.
Google is also planning to extend the service to news publishers so that they can integrate Plus One on story pages.
