Let’s say you wanted to find out what your friends or your business associates think of a new product. Google Social Search, now available in beta form to general users, lets you search for that information in the blogs, Twitter tweets, Facebook public pages, and other musings by your social circle.
Social search, first announced late last year, was available as a Google Labs project, and the company said Wednesday it’s now being offered for wider use. When you query a term using social search and you’re signed into your Google account, the results include related content created by your declared social circle.
Finding That ‘Great Baby Shop’
That social circle includes your contacts and one level into their contacts, as specified in your public Google profile, your Google chat buddies, and your Google Reader. The social contacts you’ve indicated are not available to anyone but you.
The searches return results in blogs, Facebook updates, Twitter, Blogger and images, such as from Flickr or Picasa. In the profile, the user can add or delete anyone in the social circle.
In a posting on the Official Google blog, Maureen Heymans, technical lead for social search, and Terran Melconian, technical lead for social image search, noted that their team in Mountain View, Calif., recently had two babies, and a third is on the way.
“With social search,” they wrote, “when we search for [baby sleep patterns], [swaddling] or [best cribs], not only do we get the usual web sites with expert opinions, we also find relevant pages from our friends and contacts.” This has included, they noted, a posting in a friend’s blog about a “great baby shop.”
‘Gravitational Pull’
In social-search results, a user can go to “my social circle” and see his or her extended network of online contacts and how they are connected. There’s…