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<div align=justify>Last month, Google launched its Search plus Your World function on its United States site, which takes into account some social media, such as reviews, comments, posts or photos. The results give prominence to people known to the searcher.

But two of the world's most popular social media sites - Facebook and Twitter - are not included in the calculations, prompting some critics to suggest Google is trying to promote its own answer to social networking, Google+.

The changes at this stage only affect anyone who is logged into Google and searching the US site. A Google spokesperson said the company was planning to roll out the changes internationally.

Stephen Johnson, chief executive of Altitud3, a marketing agency specialising in social media, said the changes were clearly part of a ''short-sighted'' masterplan to get more people using Google+.

A Google spokesman said users could still find information ''from across the open web, including results from sites like Twitter and Facebook''.

''However, Google does not have access to crawl all the information on some sites, so it's not possible for us to [show] all that content in the same way we can with Google+.''

Mr Johnson said the change meant businesses would have to alter their web strategies to improve their Google ranking once the changes arrived here.

He said businesses would need to create a brand page on Google+ to get noticed, spend time building other connections within the network and include relevant keywords in Google+ posts.

Mr Johnson said Google's changes to its US site reflected people's willingness to take online recommendations at face value from strangers.</div>

''Taken from http://www.businessday.com.au''
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