14 DAY TRIAL // Google has made yet another small step towards realizing Google+'s potential and intent, it is now including things people in your circles share publicly in Google Social Search results.
What this means, in practice, is that if a friend from Google+ shares a link about a place or anything online, doing a search related to that place or website might mean that your friend's post will be listed among the results.
This is what Google Social Search already did with content from places like Twitter, Blogger and many other.
"Today, we're including public Google+ posts [in Google Social Search results]. So if you’re signed into your Google Account, your search results may start including posts shared publicly by people you’re connected to on Google+," Sagar Kamdar, Product Manager at Google, wrote.
If you've been using Google Social Search, meaning you've linked your other online profiles to your Google Profile, which later became your Google+ Profile if you've signed up for the social network, you may have already noticed results from the people in your social circles among generic web results.
"Here’s how it works. Let’s say I’m logged into my Google Account, and I search on Google for [uncle zhou queens]," Kamdar explains.
"I also happen to have Andrew Hyatt in one of my Google+ circles. Oh, and it turns out he just made a public post on his Google+ account about Uncle Zhou in Queens," he continues.
"[...] that will show up on my results page for the query [uncle zhou queens]," he adds.
This only works if you're logged into your Google account and if you use Google+, obviously. It's only a small update, for both Social Search and Google+, but it's an important one.
So far, Social Search sounded good on paper, but it took too many steps from the user to become widely used. Now, all you need to do is have a Google+ account.
At the same time, one of the main attractions of Google+ for the company has been the content that people would start creating and all of the links they would share.
With a large enough number of people, which Google+ already has, this data can be very valuable for Google and it has full access to it without paying anything. Who needs Twitter anyway?