Google have announced an overhaul of their search to include results from Google+, called 'Search plus Your World'. This update highlights the problems with online 'recommendation engines' and may end up alienating users accustomed to Google's previously economical layout of search result pages. To quote from the announcement: "Search is still limited to a universe of webpages created publicly, mostly by people you've never met.", well, yes it is. A library is full of publicly available books written by people I've never met. What's the problem with that?

I don't use Google+, so for me Search plus Your World could be called 'Search plus Random Stuff From A Network You Don't Want', or 'Search, Minus Half The Useful Stuff You Used To See With The Gap Filled With Google+ Posts'. The thing is, even if I did use Google+, the personal recommendation concept that underlies the new search is a flawed one. It seems to be based on the vague idea of some West Coast lunchtime get together involving young software engineers looking for the best place to get great coffee - "Wow, because my friend's Google+ posts are now in my search results I found an awesome coffee shop down the road.", or a business trip to an unfamiliar city - "I found a great restaurant that was recommended to me by Google because my friends had posted about it". If that coffee shop is so good and so local you probably know about it already. If that restaurant is so great it'll come up in search results anyway and will be in guidebooks.

Google presumes that just because our online network likes something, we should like it as well. I have friends I hang out with, both online and in the real world, but, while we obviously have some things in common, we also have quite different tastes, opinions, likes and dislikes. Sure, they may make a recommendation I might be interested in, like the bookshop in town is having a half-price sale, but that is quite different from having my capacity to find books for myself influenced by their opinions on a certain book, literary theme, or particular writer. I don't want to walk into a library and have to look at all the books they think are great before I can see any others. Having an association with someone, especially online, does not mean you agree with their opinions and tastes.

Search plus Your World is trying to profile you, to work out what you like and dislike based on your online relationships. It is a recommendation engine built into your search results and personalised for a person just like you. However, people are more random than that. They can cope with the new. They enjoy serendipity. They want their search results to find stuff neither they nor their extended online network know about or have an opinion on.

There is always the lurking danger through extended use of becoming the type of person the recommendation engine thinks you are. One of the consequences of recommendation engines, as pointed out by Douglas Rushkoff, is: "I can become much more like a person like me ... and encouraging me to be like a person like me, they help me to become more prototypically one of my kind of person and the more like one of my kind of person I become, the less me I am.." This is a core problem with online recommendation engines and social networks in general, but I do think Google Circles exacerbate it and adding it into search results can only compound the problem.

Google seems to be losing sight of its previous core focus as an elegantly simple search engine and slowly disassembling itself as it carries on with its Google+ evangelism. Search plus My World? No thanks, I'll just have the search please. At least Google put an option in the settings to turn it off.