Your Social Circle Search Results – Google’s Social Search Experiment

I read some time ago that people will no longer “search” for information or at least it will be greatly reduced, due to friends and connections “sharing” information online through social networks.  Why should I search for something, when content of relevance comes directly to me?

Yes it is true that our friends and friends of friends are sharing information, but it does feel like a barrage of noise some of the time.  It is a constant babble that is difficult to mine through and to find what is pertinent to you when you need it most.

Research shows that we are more likely to trust recommendations from friends than from a stranger or from a business who is trying to sell us something.  78% of people believe what other customers have to say about a product or service (Source: Edelman 2008).  If the customer happens to be one of your friends or a friend of a friend, then their recommendations, comments and research becomes even more believable.

Being called an “experiment”, we have just seen the launch of Google Social Search, a new search product that draws results from friends and friends of friends.  It’s currently available in Google Labs for anyone to try and comment upon.

Social Search results will only display when you are logged into your Google account.  When you conduct a search in Google, the algorithm draws upon the public content that is available from blogs you subscribe to, conversations on Twitter and activity from FriendFeed.

Results are displayed at the end of the page titled “Results from people in your social circle for [search-term]”.  This is also a link that filters results only from your social circle.  It can be refined further by clicking on the “people” links displayed within the “search options” column on the left hand side of results.

Google finds results from within your social circle within three ways.  The biggest way is your Google Public Profile if you have one.  It is a place where you can share with the world about who you are and list the social networks or social services that you belong to.  You have the control to share as much or little information as you like.  Google appears to be quite paranoid that users will think that they are losing their privacy.  They are going out of their way to communicate that users do have control over what they publish online, who they link to and who they connect with.

If you provide a link to your Twitter account, Google will go to the people you follow and their first level of people they follow to include any relevant content from their tweets within your Google search results.  I have not seen any relevant tweets appear within my social search results as yet, however, my Google profile does not have a link to my Keyword Intent Twitter account.

The second way Google extends your social circle is through your Google Chat buddies. The third way and so far, from my own search tests, appears that Google Reader is by far the largest source of content to be displayed from blogs or content sources you subscribe to.  This is likely due to me being a big Google Reader user and thus why I am seeing plenty of content from feeds.

For the average person though, it is unlikely that they are using Google Reader or even Twitter for that matter, even though it is growing in popularity.  It’s interesting that in Google’s release posts, they do not mention Facebook, but there has not been any public announcement of such a relationship between the two companies being established as yet.  Facebook, in my opinion, is used by the average Internet user.

It will be interesting to observe how Google Social Search may change the behavior of Twitter users, if it does at all.  Currently the behavior is to connect with as many people as possible, with the aim of having the largest number of followers.  But do you really want all and sundry social search results appearing with your normal search results if you are not really interested in those people in the first place?

I look forward to playing with this experiment a little longer and overall, I do like the appended results from friends and friends of friends, especially when I run of out time to read all of my blog feeds.  For me, Google Social Search highlights the importance of growing and maintaining connections within social networks like Twitter and also becoming a producer of original content.  Certainly, I would like my own public content to appear within others search results. It’s another viable way to generate traffic back to websites.