Some people seem a little confused as to what the big deal is about Search+. This post by Danny Sullivan highlights exactly what the big deal is. 

Google is using Google Search, a property with which they have a (natural) monopoly, to heavily juice Google+, a property which is late to the social game and has many prominent rivals, notably Facebook and Twitter. 

Google is trying to spin it that they don’t have access to Facebook and Twitter data, but that’s not exactly true. They have all they need to populate the Google+ Juice Box (the People and Pages box situated in the right column of Search+). But they’re not doing it. 

And this affects by logged in and logged out users. What’s insane is that Google apparently thinks this is fine.