Mountain View, California — Taking another swing at social media networking, search engine titan Google on Thursday said that it is upgrading its social search algorithm to include posts from the Twitter, Flickr, Blogger and other accounts of a user’s friends into its Internet search results.
Google’s attempts to instill its services with social elements have been relatively lackluster when not being outright stumbles, like the company’s privacy-challenged launch of Buzz last year. Google has a popular social network, Orkut, but that popularity remains confined to Brazil. And the service has been losing ground to Facebook in critical markets like India.
Previously, social search results were more like the dregs of relevance, settling at the bottom of the search results page were they were less likely to be noticed. Google now hopes to deliver more compelling social offerings this year and its latest effort along these lines demonstrates at least that the company is serious about social media connectivity.
“Relevance is not just about pages — it is also about relationships,” Google product management director Mike Cassidy and product manager Matthew Kulick said in a blog post.
“Today we are moving a step forward — empowering you to get even more information from the people that matter to you, whether they are publishing on YouTube, Flickr or their own blog or website,” they said.
So if your acquaintances blog or tweet about their favorite coffee shops, your searches for coffee will return their musings, provided your friends are not posing somewhere that Google can not reach, like past Facebook’s privacy settings. For instance, when you log into your Google Profile and query “windsurfing,” you might notice a search result that includes an annotation about a friend who has shared this link on his Twitter feed. Google will also include content shared or created by your friends on Blogger, YouTube, Quora, Flickr, Google Reader and others.
Social connections can affect the ranking of some Google search results. “The ranking impact will be different based on how strong your connections are, and different people will see different results,” writes Search Engine Land.
“This means you will start seeing more from people like co-workers and friends, with annotations below the results they have shared or created,” the duo added.
A Google spokesman said that the company had taken a measured approach to rolling out the social component, to balance facts and opinion. Google account holders will also have the option of linking their social media accounts to their Google profiles.
Mindful of potential privacy concerns, Cassidy and Kulick said: “The new setting empowers you to choose whether or not to show your connected accounts publicly on your Google profile.”
Google said the new social search feature is only available in English for the moment. Moreover, it will also not display any input from the largest social media network of them all — Facebook — which has previously declined to share data with Google.
To learn more about the expanded Social Search, visit the Official Google Blog, or check out a demo video (below).