Here’s another interesting small change I just spotted in the search results. We are now all familiar with the “your friends X,Y,Z and x-number of people +1’d this” texts below the search results. It shows us who of our friends, or to be more specific who from our social circles, have shared, or +1ed a specific search result. It is part of personalized search and it will trigger most of the searchers to click on a result quicker than they would if there was just a title, link and description.
Now Google seems to have taken another step to make things more personal and to ‘push’ Google+ at the same time. Next to a “your friends X,Y,Z and x-number of people +1’d this” text it now says “Thank them”. And you can “thank them” on Google+ off course.
Here is how it looks:
When you click on the “Thank them” link an overlay opens over your search results giving you the opportunity to thank people on Google+:
A smart and somewhat nice feature from Google. And it apparently caught some people by surprise:
What do you think?