14 DAY TRIAL // The search landscape is getting a lot more complicated lately and all the major players are moving beyond just the traditional search, adding new elements like real time and social search. Google and Microsoft both announced a deal with Twitter to integrate content from the microblogging service into their search results in one form or another. While Google hasn't enabled the functionality yet, it does have one thing over Bing, a new Social Search feature going live today.
“Most people on the web today make social connections and publish web content in many different ways, including blogs, status updates and tweets. This translates to a public social web of content that has special relevance to each person. Unfortunately, that information isn't always very easy to find in one simple place. That's why today we're rolling out a new experiment on Google Labs called Google Social Search that helps you find more relevant public content from your broader social circle,” Maureen Heymans, technical lead, and Murali Viswanathan, product manager for Social Search, wrote.
The search engine uses your Google Profile contacts, Gmail contacts and even feeds from Google Reader to construct your social circle. The first two are obvious, but pulling feeds from Google Reader also makes sense as subscribing to a blog implies that you trust the content on it. This may seem a bit too extended but Google needs to make the searches wide enough to provide relevant information on as many searches as possible.
The search giant will pull the data from a variety of places like Twitter, FriendFeed, Flickr, Picasa, blogs and so on, from the people that it determines are in your social circle. All Google services are included but there are also some more surprising sources as well. Twitter isn't that unexpected after the announcement last week but FriendFeed makes for an interesting choice. It's even more surprising as the service is now owned by Facebook, which unfortunately isn't used for Social Search.
With Social Search enabled, results coming from your friends will show up among the regular results similar to the way Universal Search results are integrated. There is also the possibility to refine those results with the Search Options sidebar. The feature is now live in Google Labs and it may be a while before it gets integrated with the main search engine. But once it gets polished enough it could significantly improve the quality of the results in many types of searches.