Google Plus Sign - A Sign Of Things To Come?

Have you noticed the plus sign within some Google SERPs that started showing up next to invitations to map an address or get a stock quote a month ago? We know Google monitors user click throughs to validate SERP and UI results. How hard is it to imagine that Google is leveraging this understanding to predict user intent and provide what we really want instead of the page that matches the search term we enter?

PlusBox is not intended to be a competitive sledgehammer, although it may serve that purpose. Google has successfully resisted the siren call of manipulating organic search in favor of its own properties and those of its partners for eight years. The one notable exception to this discipline was the Google Tip icon used briefly in December 2006 to promote Picasa. This created a very public blog storm and some reflection at Google and was quickly withdrawn.

PlusBox is more important than bolstering finance or maps; it is a glimpse into the future of search. Search engines have dramatically improved over the last decade, but some of the improvement in relevancy is driven by how we search. We don’t tell the engines what we are looking for; we enter queries for keywords that we have learned will help the engine find sites that contain the information we want.

Plus box joins Onebox and Sitelink as the initial steps to go beyond the user query terms and provide real relevancy by using complex algorithms to create a statistical approximation of artificial intelligence that incrementally improves results — discovering what we are actually looking for and providing it within the SERP

This is the future of search. It should be fun.

This is an excerpt from this great blog: seomoz.orgYou can read the full details there.