Google Unveils Social Search

Monday 26 October 2009 | By Heidi Scott, Gosh! Media Copywriter

On Monday, Google announced its new Social Search feature, which the company has rolled out as an experiment on Google Labs.

Part of the search giant's 'Holy Grail' mission to make search more relevant, Google Social Search includes results from the user's 'social circle' in a special section within the results pages.

Explaining the new facility in their post on the Official Google Blog, Maureen Heymans (Technical Lead) and Murali Viswanathan (Product Manager), write:

"Your friends and contacts are a key part of your life online. Most people on the web today make social connections and publish web content in many different ways, including blogs, status updates and tweets. This translates to a public social web of content that has special relevance to each person. Unfortunately, that information isn't always very easy to find in one simple place…With Social Search, Google finds relevant public content from your friends and contacts and highlights it for you at the bottom of your search results."

The kind of information that Google hopes users of Social Search will love includes restaurant, holiday and product reviews from their friends, family and colleagues. However, obviously concerned about privacy and consent issues, Google goes to great lengths in video content on its Official Blog to explain how a user's social circle is built and to reassure users that only public content will be listed. Heymans and Viswanathan explain:

"All the information that appears as part of Google Social Search is published publicly on the web – you can find it without Social Search if you really want to. What we've done is surface that content together in one single place to make your results more relevant. The way we do it is by building a social circle of your friends and contacts using the connections linked from your public Google profile, such as the people you're following on Twitter or FriendFeed. The results are specific to you, so you need to be signed in to your Google Account to use Social Search. If you use Gmail, we'll also include your chat buddies and contacts in your friends, family, and coworkers groups. And if you use Google Reader, we'll include some websites from your subscriptions as part of your social search results."

In a video, Google's Matt Cutts explains that the user retains control over whether the Social Search results appear or not, but he also expands on the social circle-building, explaining that Google will add not only the user's immediate contacts but also the contacts of those contacts

Google Social Search

Google's announcement comes hot on the heels of a deal between Bing and Twitter, so Google's listing of Social Search results from the ever-popular micro-blogging site will add spice to the feud between Google and Microsoft.

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