Google Gets Google+ Overhaul

Your online searches are about to get a lot more personal.

Google's search engine, the thing that started this whole Google-palooza way back when, has undergone its biggest overhaul in a decade thanks to its fledgling social network, Google+. Starting today, any searches performed on Google will now incorporate information gleaned from your Google+ profile, provided you have one. This means that posts from people in your network will now appear in searches, and that links shared by your friends will be ranked higher among search results. Photos posted to Google+ will also be searchable in the Images section, and promoted profiles of leading Google+ users will appear along the margins of the results page, similar to Facebook and Twitter's recommended users. As Google's web search product management director Jack Menzel tells VentureBeat, "This isn’t the entire Internet, it’s your entire Internet.” Nifty tagline, that. Of course, this also puts the onus on Google+ users to make sure their connections aren't full of elderly relatives posting chain letters or acquaintances from high school spewing nonsense about abortion or the gays, but hopefully, we all learned the hard way on Facebook not to do that.