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Google 'Social Search' Results Include Your Friends

by Terrence O'Brien on October 26, 2009 at 05:00 PM

Google Unveils Social Search Results

Last week, both Microsoft and Google announced deals with Twitter that allowed them to index and search the micro-blogging site's public content. But while Microsoft immediately offered its Twitter search abilities, Google only made vague references to its possible integration into Google search, and ensured the relevancy of the results. Well, it's been less than a week, and Google has a preview of the function available in the form of Google Labs' Social Search.

The new search will add results from your "social circle" whenever you perform a query that Google determines would be enhanced by content from social networks. The results won't just include data from Twitter, however. It will also pull information from Facebook, FriendFeed, and blogs. (We have no word on whether that would only include the Google-owned Blogger, or if it would also include services like WordPress or Tumblr). The key to getting these results is sticking a link to your Google Profile in your various social accounts. Google doesn't stop there, though. It will also automatically pull content from your Google Talk contacts, provided they've posted their own Google Profile links.

Searching will also yield links to sites that you follow in Google Reader. (We do kind of question how "social" results from the New York Times or Lifehacker feeds are, but its great to have that content searchable.)

You can enable Social Search by going to Google Labs and clicking on Social Search. Even though we've allowed the function, we're still not seeing any results from it. Instead, when we try to filter results for "Social," we get a message saying "the search option you have selected is currently unavailable."

Let us know in the comments whether or not you have access yet, and tell us what you think. If you're locked out like us, just wet your whistle by checking out the video demo below. [From: Official Google Blog]

Tags: google, google labs, GoogleLabs, seach, social networking, social search, SocialNetworking, SocialSearch, top

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