When Google+ arrived on the social media scene back in June, it was heralded by a geek fanfare normally reserved for Comic-Con and Cupertino press conferences. As someone who proudly wears the badge of Early Adopter like a military chevron, I jumped in with abandon.

I made Circles. I identified Sparks. I started +1’ing.  I followed people. And then, I sat back and waited. I waited for the platform to live up to its billing as The Facebook Killer – a billing which was rather ironic considering the stupid no-nickname policy Google+ was unrepentantly holding fast to.

But the Killer never revealed itself. My profile turned stagnant and long in the tooth, and I suddenly realized that I was surrounded by a bunch of people I didn’t care about and who had no idea who I was, since, like Twitter, Google+ is all about “following” people.

There were no connections or engagements and no real conversations going back and forth, I was merely existing, listening in on blowhards discuss things that didn’t offer me any real value. I felt like I was trapped on the world’s most boring intranet.

I was ready to write it off as a social media tool because I couldn’t identify why a brand would ever want to use it. It didn’t serve a niche, fill an unmet need or deliver a universe of users that didn’t already exist on Facebook.

But then I came across an interview with Bradley Horowitz, VP of Product Management at Google+, who was talking about the direction the upstart social media platform was heading.

Google+, according to Horowitz, is “not a product, but a reinvention of Google…[it] will integrate social search…so that a user gets more personalized results that will enable them to see what their friends think or when they recommend a search result.”

Much like Doc Brown after hitting his head, I suddenly had my vision for the Flux Capacitor.

Rather than seeing the service as an alternative to Facebook, brands need to see it for what it is: The world’s greatest search engine that’s about to become even greater by making search a more social experience.

To pull this off, Google+ Social Search would require a profound buy-in from users, nudging them from passive onlooker to an active collaborator who is not only searching for information but is also +1’ing and Liking stories and search results as they come back. This participation would also grow a user’s social graph, showing up in newsfeeds and search results, and would provide the user with an opportunity to actually influence what their friends are reading and consuming.

But to change the behavior of how users – especially Millennials – use the search engine, they’ll need an incentive that will provide them with a tangible benefit that is meaningful to them as a whole.

Enter Google+ Social Score.

Now, keep in mind that such a service doesn’t currently exist. But, it would be a shrewd addition to the Google social platform. Google+ Social Score would take all of a user’s online social interactions and link them to a scoring system similar to how Klout works. But unlike Klout, where a user has to manually log into the platform to view their score, Google+ users would see their score every time they logged into Gmail, watched a YouTube video, or initiated a Google search. It would be perpetually tethered to their online experience.

Users could see it fluctuate in real-time as friends clicked on their recommended links or +1’ed their search result. This could be something Gen Y’s would constantly curate and refine, engaging in the social search process to grow their score and be seen by their friends as someone with a significant social standing.

A Google+ Social Score that is driven by a social search engine would provide us with a true indicator of social influence, focusing not on the size of a user’s friend network – which is grossly overrated – but rather on the quality of their social interactions. This level of user data would be a gold mine for brands and would represent one hell of a heavy score.

But, as Doc Brown said: “Weight has nothing to do with it.”