I was googling the word "best web hosting" and i notice the 1st and 3rd result were results with google plus. Does Google plus now play a role in improving ranking for the website?

[mainguy]

I was googling the word "best web hosting" and i notice the 1st and 3rd result were results with google plus. Does Google plus now play a role in improving ranking for the website?I see a person's name next to the website too

[eyepaq]

It's a social signal - and social signals do play a role in imporved rankings.

More then that Google+ plays a big role in personalized rankings - based on your circles and your friend's circles. So in other words if you have a G+ account with a lot of followers (real ones of course) they will see top rankings for the pages that you've plus one or shared. The circles of the ones that have you in their circles will also see top results for those - it's personalized. I will not see the same serrps as you if we are both loged in in our G+ account. The game is different now - very different.

[mainguy]

well i checked the ranking of the website based on the keyboard. And it seems that with the rank checker, those websites still appear in the same order. So for the keyword best web hosting, socal media is the same?

[CMC-SD]

The two results you're referring to, the ones with people's names and photos next to them, are blog posts where people have used the rel=author markup to link their blog to their Google+ profile. That can influence rankings. I don't think anyone is sure how much influence we're talking about; part of the problem is that the people adopting this new markup are probably already doing good basic SEO stuff, so correlation and causation can get mixed up. In any case, it's likely that this author markup will become more influential in the future, so adopting it now is a no-brainer.