Google+ opens to businesses

Google has opened the Google+ doors to businesses, allowing users to add big brands and small business profiles to its social network. 

Pages, Google's social listings service, is the search giant's first big push against Facebook's dominance over social network advertising. 

Businesses can create a page for free here, however at the time of writing Pages had only been partially released.    

Companies that already have a Page are mostly US or global brands such as Fox News, H&M, The Muppets, X Games, Toyota and ColdPlay.  

"So far Google+ has focused on connecting people with other people. But we want to make sure you can build relationships with all the things you care about—from local businesses to global brands—so today we’re rolling out Google+ Pages worldwide," said Vic Gundotra, Google's senior vice president of engineering on the company's blog.  

Google will utilise its near total dominance of search to ramp up the business service by including Google+ pages in its search results and a soon to be launched "Direct Connect" service, a feature of its search engine that takes a person directly to the company's Google+ Page when a "+" is placed in front of the brand name. For example, +The Muppets. 

The features are meant to "help people transform their queries into meaningful connections", said Gundotra.

At present Direct Connect only works for a few major brands, including Google, Pepsi and Toyota but more are coming, he said.