ReadWriteWeb

"We have no plans to inject ads into your photo albums," Google SVP of Engineering Vic Gundotra told a pretty huge audience at SXSWi today. "We should not be injecting ads into your most intimate social experiences." The man who calls the shots on Google+ understands that you don't want to be advertised to when you're looking at pictures of your newborn daughter.

"It is our goal to make ads into content," Gundotra told us. That sounds a little gross the way he put it, but it's the right idea. If you're trying to decide on a restaurant, a recommendation from a friend isn't a mere ad. It's what you're looking for.

For the third and final installment of my interview series with the people who make Google Search, I spoke with Johanna Wright, who leads the search project management team. She has worked on search at Google for over six years, leading the Universal Search and Google Instant projects.

In the first installment, I spoke with lead designer Jon Wiley about the design of Google Search. Last week, Google Fellow Ben Gomes explained how Google's search technology works under the hood. Johanna tied it all together by explaining the most important feature of Google Search: its speed.

Last week, I talked to Google Search lead designer Jon Wiley about the process of designing Google's iconic interface. What goes on behind that white box? For the second part of my interview series with the people who make Google Search, I talked to Google Fellow Ben Gomes. He's one of the elite engineers addressing the never-ending array of challenges we users pose by asking ever-more-complicated questions of Google.

The first time I spoke to Ben, he was introducing me to a brand new Google concept called Search, plus Your World. This time, we were able to delve much deeper into the fundamentals of Web search. Computing power at Google's scale is awesome to behold, and I asked Ben to take us along for a search query's ride one step at a time.

Each week (more or less), Jon, Robyn and other ReadWriteWeb team members hold a Hangout On Air on our Google+ page to take a break from the grind of reading and writing and talk face to face about the tech stories of the moment. We post prompts for what we plan to talk about, and we invite anyone in our audience to join in. The conversation streams live on Wednesdays from 11:00 to 11:30 a.m. Pacific (click here for your time zone.

This week, after a few minutes amongst themselves, Jon, Robyn and Dan were joined by Fraser Cain, publisher of the space news site Universe Today, to talk about search. How well is search working today? What's changing? Where's it heading? It's an issue that affects Web readers and writers alike, and we had fun discussing it. In case you missed it live, here's the full video.

Bing launched Bing+ last week, it just skipped all the unnecessary stuff. (It's not really called Bing+.) There's a new feature called Linked Pages that allows Bing users (U.S. only, for now) to connect their various websites and profiles to their Bing identities, using Facebook for authentication. You can also link your Facebook friends to their pages.

Thanks to its relationship with Facebook, Microsoft has the advantage of not needing to build its own identity provider or social network. Everyone's already on Facebook. To build good results for people, Bing will use the same technique Facebook Groups use: get friends to draw their own graph. Just like with Facebook Groups, if a friend connects you to something you don't want, you can remove it permanently. We all thought that feature would suck for Groups, but it worked just fine. Facebook Groups build themselves, and Bing can build identities the same way.

The design of the search page on Google.com is one of the most iconic in the Web's history, but it's in the midst of major changes. Google has redefined itself with Google+. Its notion of Web search as an index of pages has grown to include people, places and things. In addition to the search box, the page now has a share box. It takes great design to introduce all these new features and interactions to Google's hundreds of millions of users.

At the same time, smartphones and tablets are changing the way users interact with the Web, and Google has to make that leap along with them. It has to strike a delicate balance between simplicity, consistency and usefulness. Fortunately, Google's hundreds of millions of users provide mountains of data its designers can use to guide their decisions. I sat down with Jon Wiley, lead designer of Google Search since 2010, to learn more about how Google pushes its user experience forward.

This week, Google improved search results for health-related queries. When it detects that you're searching for symptoms of illness, it displays a list of new search queries for health conditions that might be related. Google now crawls the Web and gathers health information from articles, producing this list algorithmically.

Clicking an item in this list sends you to a new search for that health condition with the Web results below. Google used to keep its own Google Health database for users to track their health and medical records, but it shuttered that program last year. Google has rolled up many types of searches into its own properties, but in the case of health, it has decided to do things the old Google way and let the Web handle it.

Google and Twitter couldn't make a deal to renew their real-time search partnership, and now Google+ is plowing ahead on its own. A new Google+ feature makes searches on the network more timely, social and shareable. Google+ users can now post updates to their streams directly from search results.

If you search for a topic or hashtag, such as "SOPA," a post box at the top promps the user to "join the discussion." Posts from this box include the note "Shared from the Google+ SOPA stream." The topic name links back to the search results page.

Google launched a major new feature this week called Google Search Plus Your World and many people are incredibly upset about it. The feature presents search results from your contacts on Google's social network, Google+, and the things they've shared. It's clutter, critics say, it's unfair, it's a violation of a sacred contract between users and Google.

Be that as it may, the feature can also be pretty awesome. Below I've listed 5 examples of search queries that were fabulously improved by the availability of the new search results. What do they have in common? They surface timely and opinionated content, shared by people I know and trust. Search super-expert Danny Sullivan has shown with a long list of examples that some queries suffer at the hands of the new feature. I'd like to offer some counter-examples.

Google has "shipped the Google part" of Google+, and everything went better than expected. Today, Google launches Personal Results, Profiles in Search, and People and Pages, new features of its core search product that mark the real beginning of Google's social search era. Google search now has two modes: global and personalized. Personal search results show content from your Google+ network, and global search results appear as though you're logged out of Google+.

If you're like me, you've dreaded this day. Just last week, I wrote that Google+ was going to mess up the Internet by turning Web search into a popularity contest. But the new Google unveiled today leaves the user in control. "Search, plus Your World," Google has called it. It's two kinds of search, and they're separate. If you don't want Google+-flavored results, just switch to global mode. You can even turn off personalized search altogether.