Web 2.0: Google to roll out social search, with results from friends

October 21, 2009 | Kim-Mai Cutler | Comments | |

marissa_mayer_lgThe big elephant in the worlds of social and real-time search certainly made itself heard today.

Google’s rolling out a social search product in Labs within the next few weeks that will show you results connected to your social circle. At the bottom of the page, you’ll see results, blog posts, photos or reviews created by friends. For example, a “New Zealand” search page will turn up travel reviews written or photos taken by friends who have recently visited the country.

“This is great from a precision and relevance standpoint,” said Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products and user experience.

To use social search, you have to be signed into Google and it will determine who you’re connected to in part by looking at your Gmail contacts. When you search different items, Google will show you how you’re connected to other people, whether it’s through e-mail, Twitter or FriendFeed.

Google has also incorporated social elements into image search. For example, if you look for photos of a celebrity like Cedric Hodgeman of Twilight, it might also show you pictures of real friends named Cedric. If you do local search, you might end up pulling up reviews that friends have written on Yelp.

The features are new, but Mayer has actually been talking about the potential for social search for a while — for example, in this interview with VentureBeat about social search from January 2008.

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About the Author, Kim-Mai Cutler

Kim-Mai was born and raised a stone's throw from Apple headquarters in Cupertino by a devout Hewlett-Packard family. After attending UC Berkeley, Kim-Mai worked for Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires in New York, Los Angeles, London and Buenos Aires. Follow her on Twitter at @kimmaicutler, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • real-time search (twitter) and social stream search (facebook) is already available for google, bing and yahoo search by using the browser app kikin (kikin.com).

    does anybody know a link to a video of the google social search demo?
  • http://www.guccisneakers1.com
    It is said that there is no not beautiful female but the lazy female in the world..As long as you spend much time on yourself, every woman will be the most beautiful and fashionable .
  • AnkurSEO
    From a search perspective, I can see why searching for a celeb and getting their twitter feed could be of interest to you.

    But from a outside of twitter POV - most of what happens on there only is only in context if you are active on twitter. Most of facebook is not crawled by google - (by facebooks own doing) and it works fine for them!
  • Always the conundrum - the cross over between relevance and privacy.
    http://www.onesherpa.com
  • AllanSalvador09
    Hello! Ijust want to Thank you for this post! Very interesting.I've bookmarked it already.BTW i'm from the Philippines.

    water cooler dispenser
  • Shorty71
    I have found this article very interesting. The whole concept of web 2.0 has really fascinated me and for Google to go beyond the average search engine and to make this a community where you can keep track of friends news etc. this is quite a big step regarding web 2.0.