Google has begun rolling out a new social recommendation feature which will allow you to give your seal of approval to a search result and help it to rise higher in the rankings.

Called “+1,” the new feature will see a button being placed next to each search result. To recommend something to your friends, all you have to do is click on the +1 button and a notification will appear under the link when your friends view that search result.

Although the +1 feature appears to be inherently social, you can only directly share your +1 activity with contacts on Google services — a Google Profile is required to use the service. That seems like a strange decision when you consider the potential to share activity through social media services, but Google says that support for sharing your +1 activity on Twitter and other services is on the way.

All of your +1 activity will appear in a tab on your Google Profile, and you will be able to remove any +1s you no longer want to recommend. You can make this tab available to the public if you wish, or you may prefer to keep it private.

The +1 button will also be creeping throughout the Web as the feature expands, with users being able to click on the button from within websites they are visiting — much like they can with the Facebook Like button.

Users will also be able to click the +1 button on ads, meaning that users will be able to see ads which their friends have recommended. It is interesting to see that Google has already introduced the feature to its main revenue model. It is also an interesting twist on social curation and will like prove to be a blow to rival advertising networks which have introduced social layers.

The +1 button could mark a big change in how Google displays search results going forward. The tech giant has been experimenting with Social Search results for a while now, having rolled out an update last month which saw information from Twitter, Flickr and Quora contacts being displayed in search results. However, since +1 is a Google-only initiative, it will be able to analyze data gathered from clicks on the button directly and will include that data in its search algorithms. The button should also mean that less useful or interesting content is pushed further down the search rankings.

While the +1 button could help users curate content in much the say may that they do with the Facebook like button, it seems me that it is more of a threat to the likes of Digg and Reddit than it is to Facebook. It would be very, very easy for Google to introduce a page displaying all of the content which had been +1ed the most number of times over an hour or day and to divide this into categories.

You can activate the +1 feature now by visiting Google Labs and the button will be rolled out to all users in the near future. The feature is also only available in English search results for the time being, but more languages will soon be added.