Google Social Search – Find your friends’ updates on Google

I would consider last week as Social Media week. News sites and internet marketing blogs haven’t had enough of Bing’s Twitter and Facebook deal along with Google shaking hands with Twitter for another great deal, now we have Google Social Search.

What is Google Social Search?

Google social search which is still in beta can be opted in through Google labs. It is nothing but an amalgamation of updates from your social network status updates in one place. e.g. if you are searching for “New Zealand”, Google social search will show updates, twits and photos of your friends who have had their last vacation in New Zealand.

According to Google Blog:

A lot of people write about New York, so if I do a search for [new york] on Google, my best friend’s New York blog probably isn’t going to show up on the first page of my results. Probably what I’ll find are some well-known and official sites. We’ve taken steps to improve the relevance of our search results with personalization, but today’s launch takes that one step further. With Social Search, Google finds relevant public content from your friends and contacts and highlights it for you at the bottom of your search results. When I do a simple query for [new york], Google Social Search includes my friend’s blog on the results page under the heading “Results from people in your social circle for New York.” I can also filter my results to see only content from my social circle by clicking “Show options” on the results page and clicking “Social.”

I was searching for “Bajaj Pulsar” and got a blog page of one of my colleague Jaydip Parikh. Here is the screen shot:

 

How Does it all Work?

Now, you will think that how does Google know your friends and connections? Here are some of the main sources that Google counts to connect to your friends according to Matt Cutts:

• Google Public Profiles

The most obvious source for Google to look into their own data. Here they can find your other social network profile links, blog links etc, which makes it possible to find your other contacts on twitter, facebook or myspace.

• Google Talk Connections
All your gtalk connections will be added to your social network and updates from them will be shown to you.

• Google Reader
If you have subscribed to some blog in your Google reader, the updates from blog will be shown on the search results.

• Extended Network
If you are friend with someone and he / she has 10 other friends, there is a good chance that some of them might know you as well. So, this extended network friends’ update will be also be shown to you in the search results.

Here is a video from matt cutts, that show how does it work?

I think this will really change the SEO game. The real time search craze is getting heat and will change how the sites are ranked, although the social search is turned on only when you are logged in to Google.

Do you think Search engine optimization experts now will have hard time getting the ranking or they will find a way through as usual? Do you think social media will be spammed now like never before in order to get ranking on Google?

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