16 Feb 10

Social search just became more social

Andy Coatesworth, Search Manager, comments on Google's latest development in social search

Social Search just became more social as the latest update to Google, rolled out in beta on Google.com during January testifies.

To quote Google 'The way we do it is by building a social circle of your friends and contacts using the connections linked from your public Google profile, such as the people you're following on Twitter or FriendFeed. The results are specific to you... If you use Gmail, we'll also include your chat buddies and contacts in your friends, family, and coworkers groups'.

This means Google will integrate relevant social results within the usual search engine results pages. For example, you may see images from a friends Picasa or Flickr album relating to a place they have visited that you are now researching yourself or you might see a tweet from a friend regarding the latest news story you are investigating on Google. This raises many questions, including privacy concerns, but the main one is around the consequences for the user?

There is no doubt that seeing these additional search results adds an extra layer of information, but in many cases there will be a difference between what your connections are talking about and what you are actually searching for. To use Google's example, if you conduct a search for 'baby sleep patterns' and are returned a blog entry by a friend about a baby shop, does this really answer your query? Is it more relevant because it is your friend who wrote it? Potentially, but it is very much a case of Google contextualising the discussion, the updates, the images and the blogs that make up your social circle and their 100's of updates to ensure the results Google supplies are a) useful and b) an enhancement to what you already get in the search results page.

The positive and negative implications of social media for brands are huge and growing. (Try typing 'toyota' into Google for a stream of Twitter comment). Google has just made the implications bigger, more personable and importantly more searchable.

Knowing Google's continuous refinements to search and their quest for "search perfection" it may not be perfect right now but it will quickly get there and is likely to become an integral part of how we use search in the future.

As for privacy concerns - thats a whole different story!