Google released a new video blog on their web site today that outlined their plans for incorporating a users “social circle” into its search results. The video by Matt Cutts, a member of Google’s search quality team, discussed the basic principles behind Google’s efforts to make search more relevant by incorporating the content that is created by your online friends into results.
Facebook wasn’t specifically discussed (in Cutt’s examples he showed how updates from Twitter, FriendFeed and personal blogs might be included) but clearly Facebook is on Google’s radar. Last week, Microsoft announced a deal with Twitter and Facebook to have status updates from both social networks included in Bing’s search results.
Google's social search results
Google’s has created a control panel of sorts using its Google Accounts sign on to manage which social connection gets included. A Facebook implementation of this would be that Google would suck in a list of your friends, and look at their status updates for relevant keywords used when you search Google. For example, if I went to Google and searched for say “Food”, in addition to the normal list of sites that Google would present in its search results, a small box would be included at the bottom of the results page that had links to what my friends had said about foods they like.
I’m curious about Google’s choice to put these social results at the bottom of results pages. One could argue that a social result might be more timely or directly relevant to me if it came from a trusted source, like one of my friends. If thats the case, wouldn’t the result be better placed at the top of search results?
An important thing to keep in mind is that the social search inclusion in Google results is opt-in, meaning you only see the social mentions and links if you have enabled them through your Google account -and- are signed into Google when you use search.
Would you like to try Google’s Social Search? If so, see the directions below to enable it on your account:
- Create a Google Account if you haven’t
- Edit your profile and include some of your social sites
- Visit Google labs and opt-in to the Google Social Search “experiment”
- Perform a Google search, scroll down to the bottom of the results to see it in action
Note: You must be logged in to Google for this to work, and depending on the number of sites you have included in your profile you may or may not find results that match your query.
