Last month Google Plus opened its API to the public, but with a fairly limited set of features, which have slowly been expanded. Today the company added a few new features, most notably search. The API now includes options for searching both for content within posts and for individual users.

The blog post announcing the new features also notes “We’ve now added ways for you to see how people are publicly engaging with those posts — you can find out who reshared a post or who +1’d a post, and you can read the comments on a post.”

Services Angle

The search and engagement features will be big boons for analytics. Google Plus has experienced explosive growth, and customer service and social media monitoring services must be chomping at the bit for these new features.

The big thing still missing is the ability to post via the API, which is a big set back fro those hoping to use the service through a unified social media client like Tweetdeck or Seesmic.