Google’s Social Search Experiment
Searching for things just got more social. Google Social Search is now being rolled out in ‘experimental’ mode and can be accessed and used via Google Labs Experimental. It is a new addition for its web search, that encapsulates our ever expanding online networks or ‘Social Circles’, and allows us to easily find material written by them. It also pulls together the connections of your immediate network, effectively expanding your ‘public social graph’. As Matt Cutts explains in the introduction video, “With Google Social Search, we’ve managed to pull different pieces of your public social circle together in a single place.” What it is not, is a simple real time search feature that draws up Twitter and Facebook status updates as they are being published.
Social Results Imbedded
Once you have opted to join the Google Social search experiment, and edited your Google Profile to include links to various networks such as Twitter, FriendFeed, or blogs, the social search results will appear at the bottom of Google’s search results page.
As you can see two results are displayed linking to items created by people in your social circle. However, you are not limited to these two results and can click on the ‘Results from people…’ link to see many more. Google has obviously come to realise that people value the opinions as well as advice of their friends and acquaintances. While searching for something, a user may value a friend’s blog result as much if not more than the highly ranked, authoritative sites that currently dominate SERPs.
Expanding Your Social Circle
Where Google has made this experiment about making search even more relevant, they have also very cleverly made it about harnessing and expanding your social network. Maureen Heymans, Technical Lead and Murali Viswanathan, Product Manager state on the Google blog that, “The way we do it is by building a social circle of your friends and contacts using the connections linked from your public Google profile, such as the people you’re following on Twitter or FriendFeed.” But what they also do is include the connections of your friends, effectively expanding your network. As you can see in the screenshot above, the second social result is from the connection of a friend on Flickr.
A New, More Personal Search
Search is all about discovery. Sometimes this is in relation something you already know about and other times it can mean discovering new things all together. Google Social Search has translated this discovery into finding new connections and more from your current contacts. The title of the Google blog post was, “Introducing Google Social Search: I finally found my friend’s New York blog!” So it ties various social networks into search, delivering content from your social circle that you may not have known about as well as new connections that may be relevant.
All of the information sharing is highly transparent and user controlled via your Google Profile. The user chooses which links to add to their profile and in turn, which public information to display in Social Search results. The only existing problem is that not too many people actually have (or use) Google Profiles, limiting the current social search data pool. However, if this Google Experiment catches on, and I think it will, that will change very quickly and give Google even more information and influence.
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