One reason I haven’t been an early adopter of Google Plus is that the searchability seems to be so limited. Oddly, Search Giant Google seems to have overlooked a simple thing like titles for articles. I discovered this when I searched for a Google Plus article in Google Web Search. Here’s the G+ article, by Tim O’Reilly …
I picked out a phrase from the article to search – “I think he’s right that it’s too complex” and searched for it in Google Web Search – Google does find the O’Reilly article and several other articles that cite it (below), but the entries are just the names of the people who have entered them, with no title words at all — How strange!
Google Plus articles having no titles is especially surprising because the importance of a strong title has long been the first principle of building web pages, at least since the early days of Google. This is well-stated in an article on an SEO blog — Understanding the Magic of Metadata:
The title is without a doubt the most important piece of metadata there is. One could further argue that it is the most important part of your web page, period.
Like a Library Full of Books with No Titles
As a librarian, I sometimes see parallels between the early evolution of the Internet and the early days of books. One of the important milestonetemps for books was the establishment of the Title Page as the place where the title of a book was clearly stated (imagine books without titles). So it’s been interesting to see, over the last 10-15 years of the Internet, that the Web page title has also come to be an indispensable handle for Web pages. Is Google Plus trying to take us back to a world of Web pages without titles?
Eric Rumsey is at: eric-rumseytemp AttSign uiowa dott edu and on Twitter @ericrumseytemp
Ironic. I hadn’t actually noticed this. I guess Google sets the rules but doesn’t follow them!
Another major problem with google+ is that it breaks w3c compliance.
Not sure how I missed this post or why I failed to appreciate the missing titles. I had noticed inconsistencies with search results from Google+, i.e. some posts not showing up, and the “weird looking” results, but I failed to make the connection to titles.
Actually, I think that’s not an easy issue for them. We faced the same question at webdoc. When you want people to be spontaneous, like on Facebook or Twitter, giving them an empty box to type their title can be intimidating. OTOH, if you want people to create meaningful content that can be easily found, that title is mighty important.
Even though I’m not using Google+ anymore, I’ll be interested to see how this plays out.
I think that Google still has many things to fix. Personally I think they should work better integration of their social network with its search system so that both work together.
Maybe Google wants to maintain a distinction between their search results and their social network. For search, the goal is to deliver relevant, useful content. Maybe they believe that the social media footprint would be too large, and effectively stomp out all of the genuine organic content? :????