14 DAY TRIAL // Google has been trying to become more social, but it’s proving a lot harder than anything else it set out to do. The thing is, Google likes computers, it likes algorithms, likes cold hard facts and numbers. This approach doesn't lend itself too well to any social service, at least for now, but Google is persevering. Last year, it introduced Social Search in Google Labs, a feature which added results from your friends among the organic results in the search engine. The company thinks the feature is ready for a wider release so it's rolling it out to everyone over the next days, albeit with a beta label.
With Social Search, Google hopes to improve the relevance of the results by integrating data coming from your friends or family. It emphasizes content coming from those closer to you as people are much likely to trust the opinion of someone they know, even briefly, than that of a complete stranger. Google scours the web for content from those it determines as being in your social graph and uses it to serve personalized results. Google runs a separate effort to adjust the search results based on your previous queries and choices.
The Social Search feature uses Google Profiles to determine who are the people relevant to you, but by default, it won't have too much data on you or your social graph, or at least it won't use it without your explicit input. If you do create a Google Profile and fill out the places where you have an online presence, blogs, photo sharing sites, social networks and so on, Social Search will use that to generate your list of friends.
At this point, the feature isn't going to be that useful for most people and even those who jumped through the hoops and created a Google Profile, imported their friends from Gmail and so on, are still going to find it lacking in some aspects. But this is just a first step and Google has big plans for the feature. In a way, it may prove the most important trend for the search engine in the long term and its main weapon against the Facebook threat. Which, incidentally, isn't very well supported in Social Search.
Along with the wider roll-out, Google is also introducing the feature to Image Search. "[W]e've added social to Google Images. Now when you're doing a search on Images, you may start seeing pictures from people in your social circle. These are pictures that your friends and other contacts have published publicly to the web on photo-sharing sites like Picasa Web Albums and Flickr," Maureen Heymans, technical lead for Social Search, and Terran Melconian, technical lead for Social Image Search, wrote.