Google Search Gets Personal: Social Search Launches in Google Labs
Social Search just went live in Google Labs. Google announced that it was working on this Social Search feature at the Web 2.0 Summit last week, but at that time, Google's Marissa Mayer announced that it would only be available "in a few weeks." Social Search taps into a user's social network profiles and displays relevant links and status updates that members of a user's own social network have shared at the bottom of the default search results page. According to Google, Social Search will enhance the search experience on Google by providing users with more personally relevant search results.
To get started, you first have to head over to Google Labs's experimental section and activate this feature. For now, Social Search will only be available in the US and in English.
Sources: Gmail Contacts, Google Reader Subscriptions and Your Google Profile
Social Search can tab into three different sources, so you will need accounts on at least one of these services to make Social Search work.
Social search uses the Gmail contacts you have added to your friends and coworker lists and those you have chatted with on Google Talk. Social search also looks at your Google Reader subscriptions and the social networking profiles you have added to your Google Profile.
While you don't need to have a Google Profile, this service is a hub for your social networking profile on Social Search. Based on the information in your Google Profile, Google can auto-detect your social networking profiles and your friends on services like Flickr, FriendFeed, YouTube, Reddit, Digg, del.icio.us, BrightKite and many others.
How it Works and How to Trigger Social Search Explicitly
Once activated, Social Search results will appear at the bottom of the standard search results page and will be clearly labeled as "results from people in your social circle." As Google's search evangelist Matt Cutts pointed out to us in an interview earlier today, it is important to note that not every search will trigger Social Search results. When it does, however, the results should be highly relevant.
You can also explicitly trigger Social Search from the search options panel. There, Google will now also present a list of your friends that it thinks are the most closely related to the keywords you were searching for. By clicking on a name, you can restrict your search even further and just see results from this one person.
Social Search Makes Google Profiles More Useful
This new feature will also put a new emphasis on Google Profiles. Google has made some moves to make these profiles more prominent by highlighting some profiles when users search for people, but Google Profiles has generally not received a lot of attention from users. Now, however, as the hub for Social Search, users have an incentive to fill out their profiles - which, of course, will also give Google more information about you and your social network.
Privacy Concerns?
We talked to Google Fellow Amit Singhal, search evangelist Matt Cutts, and Maureen Heymans (the Technical Lead for Social Search) and Murali Viswanathan (the Product Manager for Social Search) earlier today and the team was obviously excited about this launch. The Social Search team was especially excited about the fact social search will now make your friends' knowledge far more accessible than ever before and that this will make it easier to find trusted product reviews and local search results.
We also asked the team about how they thought users would react to the fact that Google indexes and surfaces all of their social networking profiles and connections, which could spark some privacy concerns. In reaction to this, Matt Cutts pointed out that all of the info that Google indexes is already publically available on the Internet, including a user's friend connections. He also stressed that this was an opt-in experiment.
Social Search as "A Big Chess Move Against Facebook"
As our own Marshall Kirkpatrick pointed out last week, Social Search can also be seen as a "big chess move against Facebook." Both Google and Facebook want users to come to their sites to see what their friends are saying about a given topic. Google, however, can't tap into your social circle on Facebook and hence won't be able to highlight status updates from your Facebook friends, which explains why Google needed to make a deal with Twitter to get access to status updates from their service.
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Thanks for news ;-)
Until the results include content from my associates on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and other non-Google social networks, this feature isn't interesting to me. Any word about whether or not Google will include data from other networks in the future?
See the video of the official demo on the social search by google here
http://thetechnologycafe.com/google-introduces-social-search-social-web-3-0-video-and-review/
Is there some reason why Google can't use Facebook Connect or a similar API to expose a user's facebook profile for searching? It may appear as some form of detente between the two companies but I can't see why they couldn't do it.
I was reading about this but I was reading too about this going to be just available for US I hope than soon they can work more and give to all of the users than they have around the world.
The way I see it, Google is not interested in status updates at all. Not twitter and not facebook.
They only use the linked twitter/friendfeed profiles to build your social circle and possibly get the URL to your homepage (blogs in most cases).
So social search results will get you to a blog post of someone you're following on twitter/friendfeed.
This would be possible with facebook as well, but since it's closed, google had to ask you to connect with facebook which is not necessary with twitter/friendfeed.
I love how Google don't acknowledge Facebook in this presentation, Social Search doesn't care about Facebook..
One info is slightly wrong. It is available outside US also. I am in India, and am able to use this feature
A very good beginning introduction to how all the different social networks and Google search works. Wish I found this seven months ago when learning how to use the computer.
This is going to make things much different long term for social media. People will be able to communicate socially right through search engine results.
Just to confirm Varun's comment. It's working for me too and I'm in Israel (though using English). It instantly gave social search results.
Social search is aimed squarely at Facebook. Funny how they include twitter data but not Facebook.
"… users have an incentive to fill out their profiles…"
Data Ownership will find a focus here, a new level of energy applied to in-depth profiling. "Dynamic Profiles" will unfold to include this idea of an "evolving self"
This is where I was going with my post earlier on “Give me my data back so I can see mySelf." The convergence is motivated by our innate and natural need to evolve. One of the fundamental ways we as human organisms evolve is through human interaction and relationship - naturally and more fully and productively connecting and discovering and building “constructive” relationships among other human beings.
As over-used and abused, and ironically so, as the word "synergy" is , it is all about "human synergy" as it plays its role in the evolution of our true and potential Self and our collective of Self’s among the entire human collective on the planet.
It is all about finding other "minds" that fit better and better.
Now… here is the kicker, the need to see our innate and natural "Self" better is a prerequisite to the discovery of better and fuller human connections and synergies. We have to be more of what we are "born to be" to find the fullest expression in human connection among others, the fullest symbiosis, synergy, productivity, creativity, The (Human and Human-System) Works.
This is why all this is happening folks, naturally motivated by the human mind, simply motivated by its innate need to evolve its Self, its born-To-Be-ness
On the tech side, the hardware and interface side... we see the mirroring of more and more organically brain-projected neurological design, architecture, features and functions in our systems… this is also no accident. The web and even our current idea of a “cloud” for example, and as illustrated, looks much like a dendridic network or glial mass from our brains, no accident this. Seamlessness helps if it is true that the human mind is born to discover and connect more and more effectively with other human minds on a collective scale (even cosmic, but that is for another few generations down the road to consider as a pragmatic “tech and social” question). We are stuck where we are stuck within this paradigm and moving to another, which is scary for most and tough enough for our “known” mind’s to contemplate.
Simple, simple, simple, minds are trying to find other minds.... again, the most natural thing in the world to do, if you where a mind unknown to its host, us.
“Give me my data back so I can better see my true Self… an evolutionary benchmark, a self-descriptive path I can look at, and come to know, and use to grow… (8th Grader, 2012)”
This is the real reason within the “Why” the deeper motivation of Google and others, the why they are doing what they do…