Google search gets its biggest change in a decade with a dose of Google+

The business and financial dynamics between Google and Facebook have many points of conflict, but none is greater than the fact that Facebook has for some time been stealing Google’s ad revenue due to its ability to serve highly targeted ads based on social graph data. With Google+, Google is making a bid to acquire and build a social graph just as rich as Facebook’s — richer, in fact. So seeing Google+-related ads is one signal that Google is ready to start putting its social tools to work.

While we struggle to think of a scenario in which our friends might know more about any given topic than the Internet does, we’ll give Google the benefit of the doubt for now. But Menzel said that the judicious addition of a smattering of social media can amplify without overwhelming.

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“It usually isn’t the case where you’re making a binary decision of using only personal results or only general results,” he said. “When you’re looking for something new, it’s the mix of those results that’s the most powerful and the most useful.”

And, as Menzel told us, “The more information you have associated with your Google+ profile, the better it gets.”

Google+ results are coming today to web search, and although the company can’t talk timelines for future rollouts, we fully expect to see Google+ results in Google News, Google Maps, Google Shopping and other search properties soon.

“For this launch, we’re just talking about web search and image search,” said Menzel, “but I wouldn’t rule out improvements to those other products.”

If you, like your curmudgeonly correspondent here, bristle at the thought of yet another change to what was once a simple, beautiful product, remember that short months and years ago, image and shopping and news results were not included in the basic web search, either. Eventually, Google+ will be a ubiquitous part of the woodwork — just as Google has planned all along.

As we relayed to you lo these many months ago, Googlers see Google+ as “more than a social network or a collection of communication tools; it’s Google’s plan to bring social information into everything you do on the web, from shopping to search to email and beyond,” in the words of a team member working on building and marketing Google+.

In the end, Google+ is the new mode of Google usage. It’s a unifying umbrella for a diverse network of web and mobile apps. It’s the company’s plan for a stable financial future. Google+ is, in fact, not a mere social network.

Copyright 2012, VentureBeat