Google Search Wants People to 'Ask on Google+'

Unfazed by all the Search Plus backlash, Google continues to weave Google+ into search. The latest feature, which some users are reportedly seeing for all searches, adds a "Ask on Google+" link at the bottom of the search results page.

Regardless of the query, Google ads a link to Google+ encouraging people to try their query on the social network. The idea seems to be that, if users can't find what they're looking for via regular search, their friends may have a better answer.

"Want to ask your friends about [query]? Ask on Google+" is the entire text that shows up in the search results page.

It's at the bottom of the page so you should see it only if none of the regular top 10 results, along with the existing social ones and the various OneBoxes, helps.

Not everyone is seeing the change, so Google may only be testing it, or it's doing a gradual roll-out. It's certainly not something of the Search Plus scale, but it's one more step towards integrating Google+ into search.

More than integration though, it serves as another avenue to get people to use Google+, something that Google is almost desperately trying to do.

Search is most definitely going social. There are plenty of queries which friends may be better suited to give an answer than search algorithms. That's the idea behind Search Plus, though the fact that it only works with Google+ greatly limits its potential.

But social search, particularly this method of getting answers from friends, is certainly not new. In fact, the best example is Aardvark, a social questions and answers service that Google acquired and later shut down.

Aardvark helped people ask questions directed towards their friends or experts within their social graph, friends of friends and so on.