Google Social Search brings your friends to the search engine

Your network will help power your results

22 October 2009 15:27 GMT / By Stuart Miles

While Google waits to implement Twitter search functionality into its organic search it is testing yet another social element; Social Search.

The new offering, which will launch in Google Labs shortly, promises to allow users to see results for queries from people in their social network.

The system will work by tying in your contacts from various services like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr or Friendfeed, and give you results from that data as well as the Web as a whole.

The idea is that if one of your contacts has been to New Zealand for example and has referenced that somewhere on the Web, that search would show up in your search query, allowing you to gain relevant information from someone within your network rather than random people on a site you've never heard of.

However, in order to use social search, users need to be logged into a Google profile, from there, the search engine can then suggest connections to those listed as friends by crawling your Gmail contacts for example.

The system is expected to launch in the next couple of weeks.

Tuesday also saw the launch of Twitter on Bing, allowing users to search Twitter feeds via the Microsoft search engine.

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Full tags

Software, Online, Google, Social Search, Social networking, Search engines, Bing

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