According to the Google Blog, the search giant is expanding a feature its had for a while to make it more prominent which is showing pages that are similar to the ones you see in the results. This is an interesting move in light of Facebook’s announcement last week on their “Like” button. The difference is that with Facebook one of your friends clicks on the like button on a page and that shows up in your news feed. With Google, they don’t have the same access to your friends list, so they will use algorithms to figure out pages that are similar in nature to the ones you see in search results. One is generated by humans, one by software. With Google, you still need to execute a search and this feature will help expand those results in hopefully meaningful ways but still focused on search. With Facebook, content is being pushed into my stream by friends and enticing me to click on a page I may not have known about or may not have been searching for. It is the search web versus the social web heating up with Google and Facebook lined up as the prize fight.

Official Google Blog: Discovering pages “similar to” ones that you like