Google Adds A Social Element To Search Results

Google Social Search, an experimental feature announced today, enables you to discover publicly available web content from your social circle online. When using Social Search you will sometimes see a special set of “Results from people in your social circle” towards the bottom of the results page. These social results will include relevant websites, blogs, status updates, and other publicly-available content from your online friends and contacts. So if you’re 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.

“This is about making your search results even more relevant. For some searches, what your friends have published online might be exactly what you want,” said Tom Stocky, Director of Product Management at Google. “For example, say you’re 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’s what Social Search makes it easier to find.”

Anyone with a Google account can try the experimental tool. Social Search gives results from your friends, such as your Gmail chat friends as well as your contacts on the social sites you choose to list on your Google Profile. For instance, if you’ve added your Twitter account to your Google Profile page, tweets from the people you follow may be included in your social results.

Google Social Search is available in English on Google Labs, at www.google.com/labs
To start or or edit your Google Profile go to www.google.com/profiles