Nonplussed
Seemingly pleased with the results it has gathered from trialling its +1 button on search results pages, Google has started rolling out the +1 button to websites as well, letting visitors flag individual pages after they have landed on them.
The upshot is that users of the +1 button can now visit a page before deciding if the result is relevant to them, and worth recommending. Previously the +1 button only showed next to results on the Google's search results page (and alongside some adverts), so unless the results were obviously relevant, it was difficult to determine what was worthy of a +1 or not.
Google has partnered with a few large sites to kick-start rolling out the +1 button across the web, including The Huffington Post, Reuters, Tech Crunch and Best Buy. Social bookmarking tool provider Add This is also on board, so its prolific widget will be bringing the +1 button to a large number of websites fairly quickly. Google will also be adding +1 buttons to a number of its own properties, including YouTube, Blogger, Product Search (or Froogle, if you prefer) and the Android Market.
Google's hope is that the +1 button will help it in determining worthwhile content, as part of its ever-raging war to remove low-quality, duplicate and otherwise undesirable content from its search results. The addition of +1 to website pages, rather than just results pages, should encourage people to deliver the feedback Google wants in assessing the relative popularity - and by correlation quality - of content on the web.
