Google Social Search Taps Into Your Buzz Connections

Google introduced Social Search earlier this year as a way of providing you with more relevant search results based on your social graph. Content from your friends or the people you follow show up in search results for various queries as an alternative to the search engine-ranked ones. Now Google is pulling in more social graph data based on the social networking and other accounts you’ve connected to Google Buzz.

“Today we’re expanding Social Search using additional links that appear in the Buzz tab of your Google profile. If you’re signed-in, Google makes a best guess about whose public content you may want to see in your search results -- the content you see comes from your ‘social circle’,” Mike Lopyrev, Software Engineer at Google, wrote.

“Your social circle includes a variety of private and public connections, such as the ones surfaced through links that appear on your Google profile. To improve social search, we’ve started following a more comprehensive set of the public links from your Google profile to populate your “social circle” and to find social content,” he added.

The best example of this would be Twitter. If you use Google Buzz you may have connected your Twitter account to import your feed. Social Search will now look at the content in that feed and in the links there to determine the people part of your social graph, or ‘circle’ as Google calls it, even if they’re not connected to your Google Profile.

This also works for other Google sites, like YouTube and Picasa, if you don’t use Buzz. Google says that it crawls only the public content from your connections. If you’re unsure who you’re connected with and what content you’re sharing, you can check out the “My Social Content” and “My Social Circle” links placed besides each Social Search result. The new features are being rolled out and should be live for everyone by the end of the week.