San Francisco — Last week at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Marissa Mayer, Google’s Vice President of Search Products and User Experience, released a new Google Labs property called “Social Search,” which is intended to help Google users to find “publicly available web content from your social circle online”, became live, the company said on Monday.
According to Google Labs page explanation, which states that with Social Search, you “sign in to Google and do a search. If there is relevant web content written by people in your social circle, it will automatically show up at the bottom of your search results under a section called ‘Results from people in your social circle‘”.
Social Search will cull out results from Google services like Gmail and Reader, as well as social networks like Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. To participate, users need to create a Google Profile and add links to social networking sites that you wish Google to search. You can then activate Social Search via Google Experimental Labs.
As far as Google Social Search is concerned, your ‘social circle’ is determined by the contacts you have accumulated in Gmail and the sites that you have linked to in your Google profile. Social Search can incorporate people you are connected with in Twitter, FriendFeed, or LinkedIn, but only if you have established those connections within your Google profile.
Thus, the next time you perform a search in Google.com, click the “show options” tab atop the search results, and then click “social” on the left-hand bar. Once these details have been activated, 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. Results will be pulled from Google products and any social networks you’ve added to your Google Profile.
“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 are 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.”
Social Search is a sort of composite approach to real-time search indexing and social networking which provides posts and content from contacts in your social network within your search results. It is not difficult to see then that the proverbial elephant in the room is the conspicuous absence of content from Facebook, the biggest social networking site there is.
“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 are 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 is what Social Search makes it easier to find.”
Similarly, searching for “iPhone” extracted from blog posts where people on Twitter in which they mentioned the iPhone. Many of these results, however, came from friends of friends on Twitter — some of whom may not be familiar with.
“This is great from a precision and relevance standpoint,” said Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search product and user experience. “Social search recognizes a fundamental need for real-time information and demonstrates Google’s commitment to innovating in search.”
However, an important thing is that Social Search only works with social networks and websites where data is open and publicly accessible, 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.
The search giant emphasized that private information will not be made public via Social Search. “You can find it without Social Search if you really want to. What we have done is surface that content together in one single place to make your results more relevant,” Google said.
Interestingly, last week, Microsoft and Google announced that they would integrate Twitter posts in Bing and Google.com search results. Microsoft has already released a beta version of the program on Bing, but Google has not yet deployed it.
The service should be available to all Google users by the end of the day.