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Comment by toemetoch | Hacker News Reader

when users hover over a +1 button, they will see recommendations for other great content on your site.

Which was not why I became an early adopter of the +1 button and put it on sites I own. I included it because I wanted to optimize my sites for "social search". I hate mousehover popups and I'm not going to hand over screen real estate to google on my sites. Another js include bites the dust.

edit to clarify. I own sites that deal with a niche subject. It's not tech or science related. The first google service I threw out were ads. Sites with a niche subject get very poor quality ads, some even slightly insulting to the kind of folk I want to reach. I also invested quite some time to interconnect pages across the site for relevance. I don't want people to think that page x is the next place to go to because of some google signals.

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I don't understand your logic here. If your site deals with a niche subject, wouldn't you want Google to recommend more in-site links to your visitors (especially ones you care enough to +1 your content)?

Basically, Google is enabling you to keep your readers on your site by giving you recommended links to your site for free.

The structure to link relevant content is already there. Same with the site's search engine. I work with namespaces, titles and content and local search does the job.

The issue at hand (and to answer your question) is that this mouseover menu doesn't add value. It moves attention to popular content - not must read content. Google claims to know what the next page should be, I claim to already have that functionality. And it doesn't involve likes, votes, +1s, keywords, tags or ranks - it's about original and relevant content.

Sure, I understand you now. You're taking the content-centric approach vs. the social-centric approach. Which I guess should have been your question all along if you were adding the +1 button in the first place?

In your specific case, it sounds like you want users to look at content that you pick as relevant. In most cases that Google is targeting, they want to give authors the ability to have their readers pick what to read based on social signals and past reading/+1 behavior.

Esoteric keywords in google work brilliant for my sites. Then came social and I added the +1 button because of the nature of circles in g+. Birds of a feather flock together, so +1 would bump results for my sites for people in someone's circle and my reach would expand a notch. So I'm disabling the button in anticipation of a js option to disable the mousehover menu.

From https://developers.google.com/+/plugins/+1button/

+1 tag attributes

These parameters control settings for each button. You can set these parameters as attribute=value pairs on +1 button tags, or as JavaScript key:value pairs in a call to gapi.plusone.render.

option: recommendations

- can be: true, false

- defaults to: true

- description: To disable showing recommendations within the +1 hover bubble, set recommendations to false.

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