Today, Google announced a Social Search update to provide a more personal search engine experience. Now, your search results incorporate your social networks, such as Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Quora, Blogger, etc accounts according to relevance. Previously, these results would be at the bottom of the search page. With this update, if your friends on a social network all share a link for the same recipe, Google will show it high on the results page when you search for, say, mac and cheese (mmmm. Think I’m going to make that this weekend.)
They explain: “you’re thinking about climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro and your colleague Matt has written a blog post about his own experience, then we’ll bump up that post with a note and a picture.”
Facebook is curiously not included yet in the Social Search update. This is probably because Google doesn’t receive Facebook data that happens on personal Facebook walls, such as status updates. This is unlike its competitor Bing, who has a much better deal with Facebook.
Think Google is getting too personal? Don’t worry- this feature is available only if you have a Google account, are logged in, and have connected your other social networking accounts with your Google profile. In your Google profile, you have the option to add your Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, etc usernames and the option to keep them private from outsiders. Google considers this permission to then use your social networks to create personalized search results from all the social networks you are involved with.
Personally, I love this idea! Thoughts?
Posted- Thursday, February 17, 2011
