Google Gets Serious About Social Search Results

On Thursday, Google announced its latest move to conjoin the company’s popular online services with widely used social networking platforms.

According to a post on the Official Google Blog, Google’s search results are poised to embrace social media to an entirely new and greater extent.

In short, relevant social media content will now be interspersed across one’s search results page. That is, your search results will be supplemented by social media content pertinent to the original search inquiry.

Although it was first introduced two years ago, “Google Social Search” has always dispatched social media-related content to the bottom of the search results page.

That’s about to change.

This means you’ll start seeing more from people like co-workers and friends, with annotations below the results they’ve shared or created. So if you’re thinking about climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro and your colleague Matt has written a blog post about his own experience, then we’ll bump up that post with a note and a picture.

The update to Google Social Search will integrate information from Twitter, Flickr and Quora throughout Google’s search engine.

Facebook is not included.

New privacy settings, however, will give users the ability to determine if they want to link their Google account and social media profiles, thus making this process applicable to their online exploits.

Google will begin to implement the changes (initially available only in English) in the coming week.

With regard to Google’s announcement, Wired columnist Steven Levy says, “Google’s leaders once may have scoffed at this idea, but now they are embracing it. They are now convinced that Google, the world’s best neutral arbiter of information, should be more people-centric.”

To learn more about the new and improved Google Social Search, check out the official demo reel from Google.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hAgiIXuNbs&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]