Google rolls out Social Search

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 27 Oct 2009 at 08:40

Google has launched a new Social Search facility, designed to include results from friends and family in regular search results.

Social Search is the latest addition to Google Labs Experimental, the company's testbed for features that it hopes to roll into the main search engine.

Social Search adds "relevant web content written by people in your social circle" to the foot of search results pages, allowing you to see Google status updates and tweets from friends.

The service is closely linked to your Google Profile, which will need to be updated with details of your Twitter account, blogs and other social-networking sites for your results to appear in your friends' searches.

That could prove something of a stumbling block for the service, as in our brief tests this morning, we were unable to find any Social Search results appearing, most likely because our contacts hadn't created or updated their Google Profile information.

Perhaps to compensate for this shallow pool of friends, Google is extending users' "social circles" beyond those people they know directly. "If someone you don't know shows up in your social search results, it's likely that they're connected to someone you do know," Google explains on its Labs site.

"Social Search includes results from public connections of your immediate social circle, since there's a high likelihood that you know them as well. For example, if you're following someone on Twitter, and that person is following five other people, those five other people are also included in your social circle."

Social Search is the early fruition of the search deals Google, and rival Microsoft, struck with Twitter last week.