Google Labs brings Social Search

Techtree News Staff, Oct 27, 2009 1331 hrs IST

Search results to carry information indexed real-time from social circle

At the Web 2.0 Summit, Google vice president (search products and user experience) Marissa Mayer shared details about Google's upcoming feature dubbed Social Search. Currently, Google Social Search lies under the experimental features in Google Labs. The new experiment Google Social Search combines results indexed from the social circle of respective user. The main aim of social search, as Google puts it, is to 'find more relevant public content' from the broad social circle of a user.

Last week, Microsoft had announced a deal with Twitter and rolled out Bing Twitter search beta service to add live public updates from Twitter to its Bing search engine. Google too had announced closing its deal with Twitter and stated that it will include Twitter updates in its Search in coming few months. This is the new Google Social Search that will include Twitter updates to begin with. However, in Social Search, Twitter is not a sole service but several social networks linked with Google Profile would be used to index results from.

Social circle comprises of social networks (like Twitter, FriendFeed or LinkedIn); Contacts from Gmail, and other websites linked the user's Google Profile. Hence the user must have Google Account, Google Profile, and Google Contacts list. Activate Social Search from Google Labs' Experimental page here.

Google is clearly becoming part of fundamental shift to the social web. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, at the summit, said, "There is a very fundamental shift going on from the information web to the social web."

Google Search hereby mixes elements from social circle by real-time indexing of the updates, posts along with the usual search elements across the web. Along with the informational web content, Social Search will add results from Social Circle to the search results. A section called "Results from people in your social circle" would appear at the bottom of the page. Click the "Show options" link at the top of the results page and then click on the "Social" link to see more search results from your social circle.

However, no one would like the search engine to show up information from their social networks that may help stalkers. Google Social Search would thus be devoid from data set as private by users.

Real-time indexing for relevant search results in real-time is the next big thing in search.

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