Google Social Search Explained

Last October, Google released what they called their “Social Search experiment,” a search enhancement that brought personalized search to all-time creepy levels. Yesterday while you were caught up in iPad OMGs,  Social Search became available to anyone logged into their Google account.

So what does Social Search do? In short, if you have linked your social accounts into Google Profile it integrates relevant photos, tweets and updates from your fellow social friends into your search.  For instance when you are searching for “iPad marketing disaster,” the bottom of the page will have a Results from people in your social circle section allowing you to see others’ snarky responses on Twitter and Facebook.

But don’t take my word for it, Google posted a video on their blog explaining how it works better than I ever could.

Are there any benefits from an SEO standpoint? The reality is it will increase the incentive to encourage connections across social networks so their link/photo/update gets clicked.  The good/bad news is this is happening already anyway.

Additionally, the more connections we have across social networks, the less personalized this can be.  If you have 10,000 Twitter friends, Google’s Social Search is really no better that searching for these terms on Twitter’s normal search feature.

At any rate, it’s one more example of how the search engine results pages (or SERPs) are changing dramatically.