I just experienced the Google Caffeine update firsthand

Here’s a great example of how social media has permeated search listings:

I just did a search for “new Digg” on Google, looking for information on what they’re planning to unveil.

On the first page of results was my own blog post on the new Digg, with my cartoon avatar. But that placement wasn’t there when I looked it up on another browser. Thing is, I wasn’t signed into my Google account on either browser.

I was, however, signed into Twitter on the first browser. When I logged out, the listing was gone.

Understand – this was NOT Google simply displaying one of my Tweets in the search results page. This was Google posting my own content on Digg, from my blog, and they knew it was me because I was signed into Twitter.

The first browser in this set-up was Google Chrome, and I wasn’t able to reproduce this on Firefox. So this may be something that only happens with their own browser so far. I can’t imagine why. I’ll have to experiment a bit more with it to be sure.

If this is the new way they’re including social media, getting retweets will be a lot more important than it has been. It may not create a wealth of new traffic, but it will help you keep all that “mindshare” when people go to Google to do their own searches.

Just food for thought.