A Google Social Search announcement is giving more credibility to a rumor about the search giant’s supposed Facebook killer. Although most analysts aren’t ready to fully acknowledge the rumors behind Google Me, others believe Google is moving toward a new social-networking platform.
Google launched Google Social Search in January to help searchers find relevant web content published by friends and contacts. Google has been making improvements since then, such as using public URLs. Now Google is expanding social search by using additional links that appear in the Buzz tab of a searcher’s Google profile.
“If you’re signed in, Google makes a best guess about whose public content you may want to see in your search results — the content you see comes from your ‘social circle’,” explained Google Software Engineer Mike Lopyrev. “Your social circle includes a variety of private and public connections, such as the ones surfaced through links that appear on your Google profile.”
Collecting Social-Networking Buds
In a move to improve social search, Lopyrev said Google has started following a more comprehensive set of the public links from a user’s Google profile to populate the user’s “social circle” and find social content.
Here’s how it works: If you use Buzz, you have the option to add “Connected Sites” and post content from these sites publicly on your Google profile. For example, Lopyrev noted, you can choose to connect your Twitter account and set your tweets to appear in your Buzz stream and the Buzz tab of your profile.
In practice, this means if there is a link to your Twitter account in your public Buzz stream, Google will follow that link and add the people you follow on Twitter to your social circle. If you don’t use Buzz, Lopyrev explained, you can still add links to YouTube, Picasa and other sites to your…