Google Social Search - The latest Feature of Google That Connects You with Your Social Circle
At the end of 2009 Google released the Social Search experiment. The experiment tried to make search more personal by providing you relevant search results from your broader social circle. The experiment was based on the premise that we create social connections and post content to the web in vary of ways. Some post on their blog, some tweet, and some update their status on Facebook, etc. All this information has a distinct degree of relevance from an user to another – something that is relevant to you might not be relevant to others. And that’s why Social Search came in.
“Google Social Search is a feature designed to help you discover relevant publicly-accessible content from your social circle, a set of online friends and contacts. The idea is that content from your friends and social contacts is often more relevant to you than content from strangers. For example, a movie review from an expert is useful, but a movie review from your best friend can be even better,” says the official description of Social Search.
Your social connections, in case you don’t understand this, is consist of your Gmail (or Google Talk) chat list, anyone in your Family, Friends, and partners groups in your Google contacts, People you’re publicly connected to via social networks that you’ve listed on your profile, like Twitter or FriendFeed. If you’re currently using Google Reader, some websites from your subscriptions will included as a part of your social circle, and then people who are contacts of those in your immediate social connections.
The experimental feature, once turned on, will show relevant search results based on your social connections at the bottom of the page. This could be holiday photos from your family, a recent blog post, a status, or other information Google pulls. Just imagine searching for images of Bali on Google and surprisingly getting a number of photos from your best friend from last year. It just means more. This feature looks like things have been going well for Google and Social Search, now it has been launched as a public Beta.
“We were excited by the number of people who chose to try it out, and today Social Search is available to everyone in beta on google.com. We think there’s tremendous potential for social information to improve search, and we’re just beginning to scratch the surface. We’re leaving a “beta” label on social results because we know there’s a lot more we can do. If you want to get the most out of Social Search right away, get started by creating a Google profile, where you can add links to your other public online social services,” explained Maureen Heymans, Technical Lead for Social Search, and Terran Melconian, Technical Lead for Social Image Search.
The feature is being released gradually on google.com for all signed-in users.
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