I’ve opted in on this new feature and already think it’s fantastic. I did a search yesterday for “augmented reality” and found a really well-written blog post by a library scientist whom I follow on Twitter (I didn’t realize this- I follow many people). I’ve now subscribed to his blog. I doubt that I would have found this post without the social search feature.
The bottom line is that Google knows that social is the future of search. It’s a simple principle- People, not Bots.
Here’s some text from their announcement:
Last week, Marissa Mayer announced at the Web 2.0 Summit a new experimental feature that will improve search results with web pages created by your social connections.
“Due to the ever-increasing popularity of social networks, we’ve been thinking about how your social network could influence and improve your search results. Social Search does just that by surfacing content in your search results that is written by your friends or people you follow. That way, you get the best resources from the web overall, plus the best results (blogs, reviews, travelogues) that are relevant to you, since they were written by people you know. Social Search will be launching soon on Google Experimental and Google Labs,” explained Marissa Mayer.
The feature is opt-in and it’s strongly connected to Google Profiles and Gmail. For example, if you add a link to your Twitter page to your Google profile, Google will find the people you follow and the content they produce: blogs, photo albums, videos, reviews. If your query returns useful results from your social connections, Google will display the results at the bottom of the search results pages.
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