Try searching for #google

I see the new widget on the right side when doing that.

Ironically, the G+ post that shows up has this title: "Is hashtag support in Google Search useful if it's only for Google+?" :)

Don't use the square brackets around it, just #google

The widget on the right is a vertical slider, so result is not always the same. Result noted above was gone by the time I got there.

Interesting to note, though, that search links leading to other social sites appear below the slider...

Search #google on
Twitter - Facebook

Worth adding that right now is probably an opportune time to capitalize on getting a particular hashtag post seen.

Interesting; I tried it on a hashtag we use to cheer on the Michigan football team, and all I got were Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr links on the first page. I *know* it's heavily used on Facebook and Twitter; heck there's probably 60k worth of them put there myself.

In practical terms, does this translate as:

the element # was formerly treated as a meaningless punctuation mark in searches, and now it's treated as something with semantic meaning

?

Google can't crawl Twitter, can it? I know it can crawl Facebook pages but not personal profiles.

This is for Google+ only, so don't expect twitter and facebook in there.

Google crawls Twitter. It has limited access to Facebook.

This is for Google+ only, so don't expect twitter and facebook in there.

Sorry if my post may have misled. Yes, of course the results are for Google+ only. As I noted the "search links leading to other social sites" appear below the slider... and the searches they lead to are on those other sites.

The opportunity, as I see it, is that for a while, as people test this out, there's likely to be more exposure for hashtag searches in general, and some will spill over to the sites linked to. You'll have to post them on the individual social sites you're targeting.

Also, fwiw, the auto-complete suggestions on Google and Twitter, while resembling each other in their broader zeitgeist, do differ in the details and order shown.

I think this is pretty cute is like me you publish out to social media. I can use the hashtags from twitter in my G+ too.

Google has been forcing G+ on everyone in every way they can recently, including the need to have a G+ profile to be able to log in to youtube(along with an extremely annoying name change request), but I didn't expect them to try to hijack hashtags too.

If I was Google I'd worry that hashtags are a twitter thing, not a G+ thing. If I search for a trending hashtag I'm looking for what's hot on Twitter. G+ posts are neither updates(facebook) nor instant(twitter) and so aren't a great place to find trending news.

I don't see how this is useful at all

They're still looking for that catalyst to their social networking site.

Given how a lot of their services are now unified with G+ accounts, surely there will be a point in time where there is useful content on there for the general public.

In practical terms, does this translate as:

the element # was formerly treated as a meaningless punctuation mark in searches, and now it's treated as something with semantic meaning

lucy24 - In practical terms, I see that the # symbol or hash symbol by itself has now become more akin to a search operator, something suggesting an area of limited search... similar, say, to the site: operator, with no space in between the operator and the text.

The hashtag includes both the # symbol and the text that follows.

To think about it out loud... a "hashtag" becomes a "container" of sorts, a container of clustered references which include different attitudes and perspectives about whatever they refer to. They can be sorted out by naming conventions, time, topical relevance, user relationships, etc, which they also carry. Very quickly, this becomes semantic.

Phrasing it fuzzily... these clusters become a kind of fuzzy neighborhood of entities, and I'm certain that Google is using this hashtag search to refine its extraction of named entitities from hashtags. Google is using the same principle in certain kinds of geo-based search, image search, and the Knowledge Graph.

See various comments in this discussion...

Google's Knowledge Graph Demonstrated with 'Bacon Number'
Sep 14, 2012
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4495090.htm [webmasterworld.com]

I'm guessing Google is also beginning to use it in Hummingbird.