There have been a few articles and blog posts surfacing over the last few weeks about Google’s plans with regards to Social Media and it’s attempts to find the right formula to monetize the channel. Following Google’s launch of Friend Connect and it’s correlating ad platform FriendSense, it appears that Google is now pursuing the registration of some patents designed to better monetize the Social Media channels/networks. As per IEEE spectrum:
The patents—Open Profile Content Identification, Custodian Based Content Identification, and Related Entity Content Identification—and the algorithms behind them would let Google find patterns in users’ profiles, pages, and friend lists in order to better target ads to them. Ideally, they would make the users more likely to click through.
From a completely different angle, this article by TechCrunch suggests Google should think about joining or even acquiring Facebook to better optimize it’s own search results and include recommendations and reviews by people in the searchers network. The premise for the article is based on an app called Sidestripe that aims to pull in results from social networks into the Google results.
So on the one hand, Google’s looking to find ways to present more targeted and relevant ads on the social networks, and on the other hand it’s being suggested Google looks to social content to help optimize it’s own search results.
Either way, it seems the likelihood of search and social media converging is increasing by the day…
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