I really think that incorporating the +1 button into their actual rankings would cause Google more grief than it is worth.
It would be like a built-in spamming vector for any less-than-legitimate site out there.
It would be like a built-in spamming vector for any less-than-legitimate site out there.
google's "social" search results don't show up that often for me, but when they do, the little icon and note that says "so-and-so has shared this link" make me look at that link first because a) google has matched it to my query and b) so-and-so liked it enough to share it on twitter (and +1 now? not sure if it's working yet).
This mostly works for me for searches about programming, since that is the community I follow on twitter, but it does a great job of separating wheat from chaff and helping me stumble upon related cool things. Hopefully they don't screw this up and I can get similar benefits for other topics/related communities.