After years of dominating our websites with its ubiquitous “Like” button, Facebook is finally facing its perhaps most threatening rival to date. Facebook designed the “like” button as a means for one person to share content like websites or interesting blogs, to their friends or followers in Facebook. Such means of sharing have proven to be extremely effective for web users because of the belief that a single good recommendation from a friend is more significant to hundreds of reviews from strangers. The “like” button have become so effective that even the world’s largest and most successful tech company is now trying its own way to have a piece of the pie.

The answer: Google’s +1 (plus one) button. How it works? Well, it works exactly like Facebook’s button. When you search using Google, you will see the +1 button show up beside your search results showing you how many users have actually “+1” the website. You simply click on the button to +1 the site or “like” the site. You will eventually start to see it beside Google’s sponsored ads as well. This button will also start debuting in websites as another way to share their content. Just like Facebook, however, you also must login your Google account to be able to +1 a website. An even better feature is this; when you login your Google account and make a search for let’s say a movie review, Google will prioritize movie reviews which have received +1 from your network in Google because it assumes that recommendations made by your friends would be more relevant to your than hundreds of experts advice. In short, you get an even more effective or personalized search result from Google.

On a marketing level however, the +1 button will definitely improve your Search Engine Optimization and really help your website in terms of Google Search Results ranking. The more +1 your site receives, the more Google Search will crawl and recrawl your page continuously reconsidering that the website is indeed important to many people and assumes it may be equally significant to you as well. Though it obviously has some disadvatages over Facebook’s “like” button, especially considering that you must have a Google account which not everyone really does, this is one button that will surely have a strong impact on the information we receive over the net. It is indeed another addition to the already culttered icons of social site buttons in every webpage we visit but this is perhaps a clutter that might just be that more effective and eventually singularly remove the others. We are not betting on it yet but as you can see above, we surely have implemented it. So how about “+1-ing” us?