Google is directly competing with Facebook in yet another way, now that it deploys its own version of the iconic “Like” button they dub as “plus-one”. It encourages people to be more social, allowing users to vote on relevant searches and share predilection over Gchat, Gmail, Google Reader, Buzz and etc., and soon, Twitter. Searchers will be able to see the number of plus-one votes on a search and who voted for them, with photos.

Gradually integrating plus-one features into its algorithm of search, human votes will greatly affect the ranking. “When someone recommends something, that’s a pretty good indicator of quality,” said Matt Cutts, Google’s principle engineer for search. “We are strongly looking at using this in our rankings.”

Ads can also be voted via plus-one. It can increase clicks according to internal tests. The functionality isn’t changed but we can expect for better ads. “We will provide reporting in AdWords for plus-ones,” said ads group product manager Christian Oestlien. “Our belief is that advertisers will see increased performance from ads with personalized annotations.”

Inbound links used to be the almost sole determiner of relevance and page rank but plus-one buttons on top of social connections are going to make search-results page more complicated in terms of real-time and local-search results. Google embedded Twitter updates last year, and is now adding plus-one as well.

“Injecting a social layer into the algorithmic search is key to relevance,” said Dave Karnstedt, CEO of Efficient Frontier. “Do a search on ‘DVD player’ today now you will see 35,000 results in less than 3 milliseconds. It’s meaningless, but if you can sort through those by people who have given a social signal and those rise to the top, I think that can only enhance the user experience.”

Microsoft’s Bing embedded Facebook “likes” into their search results but not into the actual algorithm, which means its page ranks aren’t directly alterable by human elements. However, Google is not planning on adding Facebook connection to the system because it was reported that they weren’t allowed to do so in the first place.  This latest move by Google adds another strike to their defense, throwing more fuel into the flames of competition between these two powerhouses, especially when it comes to socially influenced search and recommendations.

“Its important for Google to bring in social influence into search results to prevent the social web from becoming a parallel universe,” said Bryan Wiener, CEO of 360i, a unit of Dentsu. “I do think they need to have the Facebook ‘likes’ in there because you’re going to have two webs, the social web and the open web.”

The plus-one button also works outside search and can greatly improve ranking of contents in organic results. Google still holds the largest publisher network but can this actually block spammers from trolling and profiting? Spam sure did have its way to the top of the page rank via SEO but we can only hope of Google ‘s experience dealing with this scam.

“The worst case is you just ignore them,” Mr. Cutts said. “If you give somebody five signals — and give them five more — it can actually get harder for spammers.”