The impact of social networking sites on our Internet browsing behavior is continuously on the rise. People spend a substantial part of their browsing time on social networking sites. And, the number of such social networking sites is itself going up over time. If you want to find out what you said something on such a site or what your friend said a month ago, or for that matter, what is relevant to your social networking browsing behavior, generally speaking, you can do it right now but from within the social networking site concerned. Now Google Search makes it possible to make a Social Search relevant to you and your friends (and, friends of your friends) at a central place. No, you don’t have to make a specific Social Search on Google. As and when you search some word or expression on Google Search, as you would do normally, it can also automatically make a Social Search and show the results of your social search along with the general search results. So, you can now get information from the public contents of your social contacts from right within the normal Google Search results. Google Search gets personalized for you to that extent.
Last week, Google had announced an agreement with Twitter to include contents from tweets in its search results. So, now that feature goes live in the form of an extended Social Search. The official Google Blog has announced inclusion of Social Search in Google Search results when you search anything. At this juncture, this feature is being rolled out as an experimental feature of Google Labs.
How it works? You must have a Google Account for accessing this feature. If don’t already have a free Google Account, you can easily get it here now itself, free, by providing your email address; and it is not necessary to provide only your Gmail address, you can provide any other email address as well, such as from Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail. Moreover, you must be logged into your Google Account to access the Social Search feature; in fact, it is for your own privacy since the results are specific to you.
So, when you make a normal search for any expression at Google, the results from Google Social Search, relevant to you, will be included in the search results (if you are signed in to Google Account, as mentioned above). To see these social search results, click the Show options link displayed in the bar just below the Google logo in the search results page; and then click Social on the left side-bar. Now you can view results from your Social Search relevant to the expression that you’ve searched. To learn more about it and find out how it works, watch the following video from Google:
This is what Google states about what sort of information will be displayed in Social Search:
“All the information that appears as part of Google Social Search is published publicly on the web — you can find it without Social Search if you really want to. What we’ve done is surface that content together in one single place to make your results more relevant. The way we do it is by building a social circle of your friends and contacts using the connections linked from your public Google profile, such as the people you’re following on Twitter or FriendFeed. … … If you use Gmail, we’ll also include your chat buddies and contacts in your friends, family, and coworkers groups. And if you use Google Reader, we’ll include some websites from your subscriptions as part of your social search results.”
If you’re interested in knowing how Social Search works behind the scenes, and what are the choices and controls that you have over the content that you’ll see in your Social Search and share, watch the following video from Google:
It appears that at this juncture, Social Search does not include search of contents from Facebook, though that may perhaps be included at a later stage. But, let me point out the relevance of another feature of Social Search; it will also include results from the public content of your friend’s friends, thereby extending your social network. However, this may also show you some contents from some unknown persons which may not be directly relevant to you. There appears to be no option to disable the search contents from your friend’s friends, at least at this time in case you don’t want to extend this search to unknown people’s contents that may sometimes make your task difficult to find your own information if such other content is massive.
One more important aspect of Social Search is the real-time results. You may get real-time results from your contacts or social networking content relevant to you. This may enable you to keep in touch with your friends in a better way.
Did you like this article? To get all such articles from Tech Superb directly:
Related Articles:
If you would like to make a comment, please fill out the form below.
