Google Social Search is a feature designed to help you discover relevant publicly-accessible content from your social circle, a set of online friends and contacts. The idea is that content from your friends and social contacts is often more relevant to you than content from strangers. For example, a movie review from an expert is useful, but a movie review from your best friend can be even better.
What is there in the social search or what type of content it provides
If you’re signed in to Google, you might see social search results for a particular search at the bottom of the results page under “Results from people in your social circle.” All the content shown within Social Search is publicly-available online through Google and other search engines. Social Search simply highlights content from your social circle to provide a personalized search experience.
Here are some of the types of content you might see:
- Websites, blogs, public profiles, and other content linked from your friends’ Google profiles
- Web content, such as status updates, tweets, and reviews, from social services that your friends have listed in their Google profiles
- Images posted publicly from your social circle on Picasa Web and from websites linked from their Google profiles
- Relevant articles from your Google Reader subscriptions
See a list of your social circle connections at google.com/s2/search/social. That page shows your direct connections, secondary connections (friends-of-friends), and some of the content that each of those connections has published publicly to the web. You can also reach this page by clicking the link next to “Results from people in your social circle” on any Google search results page that’s showing social search results.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 at 12:20 am and is filed under SEO & SEM. 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.
