Google News now highlights +1’d articles from people in your Google+ circles in its Spotlight section. Friends’ faces and Google+ profiles are displayed next to the link, just like in Google’s social search results. Earlier this month, Google News added the same feature for authors, showing Google+ info under their headlines.
While today’s new social features are limited to the Spotlight section, it adds another way in which Google News can personalize content for logged-in users using their social data. Google is rolling out these kinds of Google+ features across all its Web properties.
Yesterday, Google converted Google Chat to be based on G+ circles rather than email addresses. Earlier this month, the +1 button came to image search. YouTube and Google Reader have both gotten complete G+ makeovers, though YouTube’s hasn’t rolled out yet.
Google Web search has treated public G+ posts as search results since soon after the social network launched. Google is insisting upon making its new social layer a pervasive, personalized filter for the whole Google experience.
It’s all part of an effort to redefine relevance in the way Google crawls the Web. Instead of brute rankings of the Web’s content, Google has decided that personal, real-time recommendations are more relevant to us. Do you agree?
