Authors: Ryan Sanders and James Hrenak (Poc Network)

“Google today unveiled a new project to give its flagship search engine a social makeover.” (Kenneth Corbin -- Internet News)

Google recently mentioned it at the Web 2.0 conference as an upcoming project being worked on in Google Labs.

Basically Google is trying to bring the two world of social and search together by including such material in your search results. Google will use information found in places like public Google Profiles, tweets from Twitter, and popular blogs to bring current news and discussion related to what you are searching for. Google is calling it “Social Search”.

When you make a search, you will be given the typical results you are used to, only now there will be a new section at the bottom that will share this information as well.

This is part of Google’s efforts to evolve the way we search into something more. A popular goal being sought by many major search engines including Yahoo and Bing as well.

So when you search for a fun club or restaurant to visit in your area, you will not only get the information on such establishments, but also direct results for reviews or blog discussions regarding the same.

It can also feed you results from your contacts and friends who have discussed anything related to your search query.

Of course it will only pull such information from profiles, blogs and various other social hubs that are already freely available on the web to anyone. Google explained that private profiles and such will not be included (to address concerns about privacy).

Google posted a video demonstration showing how the new approach to search will work, and explains how you can edit the settings of your Google Profiles to disallow certain information from being seen in such search results. You must also be logged into Google (have an account) to use the new social search features.

You can sign up for Social Search at the Google Labs website.

This ads even more to the possibilities of being seen in search engines. We have dug a little into this in our last few posts going over the changes that Microsoft Bing and Google have been working on.

As mentioned in those posts, contact us today to learn more about how these changes can help you!

Google Merging the Worlds of Social and Search

Tags: Gmail, Google, Google Labs, Google Profiles, Search Marketing, SEO, Social Search

This entry was posted on Monday, October 26th, 2009 at 9:25 pm and is filed under Internet News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.