Once again Google has come out with another feature; this one seems a little more experimental than fundamental. I’m sure most of you are all familiar with Facebook’s like button where you can place your stamp of approval about a topic, article, brand, company and just about anything by clicking the like button. Well Google will be coming out with their version of the like button but you will be clicking a +1 (plus one) and that will be integrated into Google’s very own social network. This however will be connected with Google’s whole new social networking site +1, as if we didn’t have enough social networking sites.

I wrote about social search awhile back and discussed how social networks were weaving their way into Microsoft’s and Google’s search engines. We as users can choose to like a certain brand or product which will then show up in future search results and advertisements to us and anybody else who is connected with our Google account including your Gmail contacts. You are more likely to click on something if someone you know has +1’d  it. You can look at it as a helpful guide or friendly advice when you are clueless about what you think you might like. It should also improve the quality of search by weeding out the garbage of content farms. You do have to enable the +1 feature in your Google account to make this happen.

The idea is novel and can provide benefits to the users of search engines however I don’t know if Google is the best candidate to pull off this social service. Social is not Google’s forte and they have been known to try out many things to no avail (Buzz, Answers, Orkut). One immediate issue I can see is that how are you supposed to click +1 to like an article when you have to click on the actual article first to read it. Do they expect users to click back after they read it? Also +1 sure sounds like a social network and to build a social network that is active and as elegant as say Facebook’s takes many years to be that connected.

I think Google is very necessary for innovation and a breath of fresh air when it come to technology. I just think they try to do too many things sometimes and hope +1 achieves its intended goal of improved search results rather than being intrusive and cumbersome.