14 DAY TRIAL // One interesting thing about the new Google+ Pages and an obvious move for Google is integrating pages into search. With Direct Connect, you'll be able to find the Google+ page for your favorite brand or artist and go directly to it from the search suggestions.
Direct Connect only works for some pages for now, but it will be opened up for more, thre's more info here.
For the one that it does, all you have to do is start your search with a '+' for example, searching for '+google' will surface Google's main Google+ page in the suggestions.
Obviously, you can click directly on the suggestion and go to the page, bypassing the search results page entirely.
Google has also started adding Google+ pages to search results, where it's relevant. There aren't that many pages at this point, but expect to start seeing more of them in search results in a few weeks.
"Maybe you're watching a movie trailer, or you just heard that your favorite band is coming to town. In both cases you want to connect with them right now, and Direct Connect makes it easy—even automatic," Vic Gundotra, who heads Google+ efforts at Google, wrote.
"Just go to Google and search for [+], followed by the page you're interested in (like +Angry Birds). We'll take you to their Google+ page, and if you want, we’ll add them to your circles," he explained.
It's a really powerful tool especially if people actually start using it. Most likely, just like with Google's other search operators, it's going to remain a tool for the power users, unless Google puts some serious marketing muscle behind it.
It's interesting that Google debuted the new Direct Connect feature just a couple of weeks after it removed the old '+' operator which was used to search for exact words. Google didn't specify any reason for the removal at the time, but the link to Google+ was rather obvious.
