Google released Google+. But what they are doing is actually fight back Content-Farms with stupid “content” and Facebooks Social-Graph.
Their first step was change the algorithms to calculate the search results different. Do not trust websites which just give you lots of buzz- and keywords. Remove content in search results which was optimized by companies (SEO) to generate a lot of traffic. That is neither what the web is in need of nor what a typical user wants to read. So they had to add more value on people recommending content not keywords. The added the Google +1 Button. Letting people decide which content added value to their research.
The next step had to be adding recommendations from your friends to your search results. To identify your friends, Google could not just relay on data they get from Google Contacts (e.g. GMail) but were in need to create something like Facebooks Social-Graph. Which is exactly what Google did with Google+. (Thumbs up, a social network that adds more value than Facebook or Twitter ever did).
So the next logical step is, adding semantics to articles, blog posts or any other content that you as a user produce online. Google adds Authorship (with complete description). A way of linking your content back to your Google+ profile, which is then processed by Googles Searchbots. This is actually done by adding the:
<a rel="author" href="https://plus.google.com/<your-id>">Your Name</a>
to each content you produce.
Et voila. This leads to more semantic and more value of search results and even shows my profile picture beside search results for my friends. This is great.
Let’s see what’s next. I am excited.