Google Social Search Goes Live

Google's new feature allows users to include information from other social networks, such as Twitter, and blogs in their search results.
The tool – which was announced last week at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco – is aimed at helping Google users to discover "publicly available web content from your social circle online".

Google will suggest connections to those listed as friends on users' publicly available social network profile information and by crawling a user's Gmail email contacts.


 Once these details have been tracked for the first time, search results from social networks will always appear at the bottom of the search results page, along with an indication of which network the information had been pulled from.

Users will be able to enable social search through the Google Labs section of the website, and they will need to be logged in to their Google Profile, an online reputation management tool.

"These social results will include relevant websites, blogs, status updates, and other publicly-available content from your online friends and contacts," said Google in a blog post.

"So if you're planning a trip to Cairo, and a friend of yours happens to have listed great places to stay on his website, Google Social Search makes it much easier to find this kind of content."

"This is about making your search results even more relevant," said Tom Stocky, director of product management at Google. "For some searches, what your friends have published online might be exactly what you want. For example, say you're looking for movie reviews and one of your friends happened to write about that movie on his blog – you would probably want to read it, and that's what Social Search makes it easier to find."

Social Search only works with social networks and websites where data is open and publicly available, so Google admitted that the tool would be unlikely to crawl sites such as Facebook, where the majority of information is hidden behind privacy settings.

“This is great from a precision and relevance standpoint,” said Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search product and user experience. “Social search recognises a fundamental need for real-time information and demonstrates Google's commitment to innovating in search.”

The launch of Google Search comes just days after Google announced it had signed a search deal with Twitter to integrate tweets in to its search results. The microblogging platform has a similar deal in place with Microsoft's Bing search engine.

In a blog post to mark the partnership, Google said: “Given this new type of information and its value to search, we are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results.

“We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months. That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favourite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.”

Real-time and hyperlocal search are the new battle fronts for search companies, who are trying to make results more personalised and relevant for users.

Source:telegraph.co.uk