For those who are having a go with Google Plus, one of the early problems is being able to find people or, perhaps more importantly, posts or topics of interest so you can find interesting people to follow. Fortunately, this is a very easy thing to overcome, especially if you are using the Chrome browser.
What you need to do is set up a custom search engine which will search for either posts on a particular subject or a profile, much the same way as you conduct a normal search in your browser. This set up is a one-time operation.
Click the wrench/spanner icon at the top right of the Chrome browser and select ‘Options’.
Under ‘Basics’, select ‘Manage Search Engines’.
In the box labelled ‘Add a new search engine’ type the name for your new engine, such as Google+
In the ‘keyword’ box type ‘posts’
In the’ URL’ box copy and paste this exactly as it is: {google:baseURL}search?q=site:plus.google.com inurl:posts/* “%s”
You now have a ‘posts’ search engine set up.
For a ‘profile’ search engine, type Google+ as your ‘engine name’, ‘profiles’ as the ‘keyword’ and paste the following into the ‘URL’ box: {google:baseURL}search?q=%s&tbs=prfl:e
Now go to your browser and in the search box type posts followed by a space (which brings up the search engine automatically and you will see ‘Search Google+;’ in the search bar) followed by whatever you want to search for, like cars or octopus, just as you normally would.
Similar procedure for profiles if you are searching for particular people.