Google Results Will Be Influenced by Your Friends with 'Social Search'

The search world is changing and it's becoming more complex and more spread out. The big search engines are doing a great job at recovering the static information available on the World Wide Web but a much poorer one with real-time information or with social search. But that is changing with both Bing and Google announcing new search deals with Twitter and now with Google launching a new Social Search project in Labs.

"We've been thinking about social networks for a long time," Google's VP of Search and User Experience told the audience at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. The new Social Search tool will add a social element to the search results by including some that come straight from your friends across different social networks. The idea is that these results may be more relevant for the user than generic ones from the web.

"What we've done here is inserted, on the bottom of the page, content written by people in your social network," Mayer explained, also saying that the tool should "really improve the overall relevance, comprehensiveness, and quality" of the search results. For many types of searches users tend to put a much greater trust in the things their friends recommend rather than some random stranger or even experts.

The tool should be launched in the coming weeks but will be entirely opt-in, at least for the time being. Users will be able to enable the functionality by going to the Google Labs repository and selecting the Social Search option. The data will be pulled from a variety of sources like social networks but also Flickr, Yelp, etc. The tool will identify your friends by contacts in Google Profiles, which is somewhat limiting as the service isn't as popular as many other social sites.

Google will then search for information on a number of social sites but there is another caveat as it will only be able to recover data from sites that are opened to third parties so this means no Facebook for now. Bing on the other hand has announced a partnership with Facebook and will include status update results in the main search engine. Microsoft of course has a stake in Facebook and the two companies have a stronger relationship, with Bing powering Facebook's own web search.