Google Introduces Social Search

Sonya Wood - November 16, 2009

People on the web publish content in many different ways that include using Twitter, Facebook, blogs and other social channels. But if you have ever searched on Google to find a blog your friend published, you most likely wouldn’t find it in the top search results. Google is changing all of that by introducing Google Social Search on Google Labs.

Google Social Search is designed to help you find more relevant public content from your social network in one place. In Social Search, Google will find personalized results from your friends or contacts and highlight them at the bottom of your search page.

No private information will be seen, as Google will only show information that is published publicly on the web. All the information in Social Search can be found elsewhere, however Google is putting all of the content together in a single place to make your results more relevant and personalized.

Google builds a social circle of your friends, connections and contacts using the links from your public Google profile, such as people you are following on Twitter or other social media channels. This new feature will also use your connections from Gmail; however you will need to be signed into your Google account because the results are specific to you. Your social search results will show up at the bottom of the page under “Results from people in your social circle.”

Social Search will make search results more relevant and personalized for you specifically. Next time you do a search on Google, be sure to see what your social network has published about the topic.