Google's new +1 button with recommendations
The feature encourages users to discover new apps or information on the site they are visiting. It also highlights website content that is popular with other Google+ users.
“+1’ing something has always been a fun and lightweight way to engage with online content. It’s also a powerful discovery tool, making it easier for friends to find the best content by showing social annotations in search results and ads, and now we’re taking it to the next level,” announced Google Engineering Manager Julie Farago in a post on Google+.
“To keep these recommendations more relevant and on-topic, they will always refer to pages on the same domain or subdomain as the +1 button,” she added in a post on the Google+ Developers blog.
Google +1 recommendations are currently only available to users on a desktop computer, but a mobile version is also in the works. According to additional comments made by Julie Farago on the G+ post, Google is creating an “awesome, non-hover based mobile experience as well.”
The Google +1 button originated as an alternative to Facebook’s “Like” button, but with the addition of new social and personalized content recommendations the +1 button may eventually become a more useful web browsing tool.
You can expect to hear more about +1 recommendations during Google’s I/O developers conference.
The +1 button update will be rolled out to users over the next few weeks.