Mountain View, California — In a bid to elevate its social profile, and just nineteen months after it originally introduced the feature in North America, Google on Thursday unveiled plans via its new official Search Blog that it is rolling out Social Search in 19 more languages, increasing its reach to more countries around the globe.
Google’s Social Search has initially been unfurled in October 2009, is a feature that combines regular search results with publicly available data created by your friends’ social media activities, and when a users is logged on to their Gmail account, allows them to see information from social networks in their search results.
This functions by crawling the user’s Gmail contacts and with this, Google Search can inject in to its results the social sharing habits of users’ friends from across a variety of popular social media networks including Facebook.
According to a Google software engineer, Yosser Coppel, announced the roll out on Mountain View’s official blog:
“In 2009 we first unfolded Social Search on google.com as an experimental feature designed to help you find more relevant information from your friends and the people you care about. Since then we have been making steady enhancements to connect you with more people and more relevant web results. Today, we are bringing Social Search to more users around the globe.”
While Google has been doing social search since 2009, though earlier this year it was updated to be more worthwhile, with social results appearing throughout the SERP, as opposed to just in a cluster at the bottom of the SERP. Google says they are mixed in based on relevance.
“For example, if you are looking for information about low-light photography and your friend Marcin has written a blog post about it, that post may appear higher in your results with a clear annotation and picture of Marcin,” says Coppel.
Generally, the key-phrase “friends” is vaguely defined and include people in your Google Talk friends list, your Google Contacts, people you are following on Buzz and Google Reader and other networks you have linked from your Google profile or Google Account. Google can also find your friends on public networks such as Twitter and Facebook and gather the data from their public connections as well.
Especially so, “If you are searching for information about modern cooking and your colleague Adam shared a link about Modernist Cuisine, you will see a comment and picture of Adam under the result. That way when you see Adam in the office, you will know he might be a good person to ask about his favorite modern cooking techniques,” Coppel wrote on the blog.
Furthermore, a social search feature available in the U.S. now that will also make its debut abroad later is Google’s +1 button and data, which is designed to let Google search users recommend results and share that feedback with others. It is similar to Facebook’s “Like” button.
The move capitalizes on the global prominence of social media and its increasing impact on search, and follows on the news of increased integration between Facebook and Microsoft’s Bing search engine earlier this week.
While the Bing-Facebook mashup is clearly an advantage for Microsoft at this point, it is quite possible that Google will at some point strike its own deal with Facebook, but for now, Social Search should be available in 19 languages next week, with more languages on the way. Check out a video overview of the feature below.
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