At the Web 2.0 Summit today in San Francisco, Google’s Marissa Mayer unexpectedly came on stage to unveil a new product. She first announced that Google has also reached a deal with Twitter, which she wrote a blog post about earlier in the day, following the announcement that Bing and Twitter had done the same thing.
But Mayer had more to share. There’s a new Google product called “Social Search” that is launching soon in Google Labs. This is a new feature that allows you to see results for queries from people in your social network. This works by using your Google Profile. If you fill it out with the other social networks you’re a member of, such as FriendFeed, Google will scan who you are connected to and give your results from those people.
Keys to this type of search will be local information as well as image searches, as Mayer and another Googler showed off today on stage.
Mayer didn’t say it, but it’s probably safe to assume that this will only work for networks where the data is open. That means that you’re unlikely to be able to use your Facebook social graph for these web search results.
This will launch in the next few weeks. This experiment will be opt-in for now, Mayer says.
John Battelle asked Mayer how Twitter would work with Google. Mayer said that it will be integrated into regular results. A key to this functionality will be when articles and blog posts haven’t been written yet about breaking items.
When pressed, Mayer would not disclose the details of the Twitter deal, but she did say the keyword, “financial terms,” as in, money changed hands. This is in contrast to the deal Facebook struck with Bing, in which no money changed hands, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said earlier today. “We’re not trying to make money on data,” she said.
this is great news. as real time web and sharing increases velocity; pulling results to the surface around keywords, topics, events, will be really interesting and highly relevant if they can be sliced by content type: links, photos, references, lists, etc..
cheers!
Rodney Rumford
Tweetphoto Co-Founder
It’s interesting how Google is interpreting its fascination (frustration) with Twitter’s adoption and value to the community.
I think this is classic “if you can’t beat ‘em (or buy ‘em), join ‘em” – although with Google, they always have an ace up their sleeve.
bing has a deal with twitter AND facebook
not only that, bing has a product out right now thats testable.
http://bing.com/twitter
i like bing’s interface better than twitter’s own. For example, they expand the url of a shortened url so you can see where the link goes. try it
Real-time web. Marissa photos on the web. LOL track.
Social Search looks pretty interesting. Looking forward to seeing this live.
Big brother….
I know an engineer who worked on this. He’s a god-damned genius.
Send in the [SEO] clowns. I sense a whole new kind of SEO douchebaggery on the horizon.
yap, thats the first thing that came to my mind when i read the story.
hopefully they can handle the upcoming SEO spam which tries to get #1 Ranking by rapid-firing Tweets about the Viagra, Free P*rn or whatever.
real-time search (twitter) and social stream search (facebook) is already available for google, bing and yahoo search by using the browser app kikin (kikin.com).
does anybody know a link to a video of the google social search demo?
Google is in scramble mode today. Never seen them like this before. Very interesting how defensive/reactionary they are behaving towards Bing’s every move.
[full disclosure: i don't work Microsoft and I use a Mac]
Facebook has a stream access api. Google might use facebook connect to fetch and index the user’s stream (it’s an opt-in procedure)
I await news of something groundbreaking from Marissa Mayer. Way overdue and this is not it, IMHO. Please show me something she has lead that is visionary or even highly profitable. Maybe I’m just unaware.
You can only get by on a nice smile for so long.
Is this the business model no one seems to be able to spot?
What will the integration of “social network” data on search results have on the SEO industry?
There are tons of social search services out there, the ultimate in social search is what http://www.lavva.com is promising, i saw a demo and it’s fascinating
Why does Google have to pay Twitter in order to use their data? They are not paying to other content owner like news websites etc, are they.
Probably to get the real time data instead of having to use their API every few milliseconds (which I guess is against their TOS).
This way it also helps Google stay on top of any new features Twitter may be coming up with, or get an idea of the trends before the folks at Twitter can figure it out.
Raw data directly from the source is always a better option if you have the resources to handle that data.
“Social” is not something that is part of Google’s DNA. This is an engineering company with geeks looking to automate and take control of the world through the use of machines and algorithms.
“This is a new feature that allows you to see results for queries from people in your social network.”
This has already been attempted: eurekster, delver
It’s only Google who can do it!
All i got from this story was: “At the Web 2.0 Summit today in San Francisco, Google’s Marissa Mayer unexpectedly came on stage”
After that, it got a little blury
(sorry for the sexist remark. couldn’t resist it)
Why do I see obsessed girlfriends using this to search for comments from their bfs’ exes…
Real – time = real junk
Nice, guess this means i’m deleting everyone of my social media accounts.
Wow, most impressive dude. I like it!
RT
http://www.anonymous.ua.tc
I think many readers may find a post of mine from over 3 years ago of interest.
The Future of Search: Social Search
http://dave.notik.com/node/21
It gives some context and reminds us of some of Google’s earlier moves in the social search realm.
–D
hm, since there is financial side of contract, I wonder SLA part. Due to constant twitter outages I’m sure its not 99.9% availability :P
I can definitely see this creating waves of SPAM in the Twitter world and beyond. I would think that in the end the search results will require a minimum threshold of tweets to be featured, similar to what Digg has done recently with their no-follow, thus avoiding the links from one person tweeting the same porn or forex site hundreds of times daily.
In the end, the people who will be able to use social effectively will still have to have lots of online friends to move the scale -IMO.
This is really a great news as far as Google’s Social approach is concerned. But the question is will Google be able to outbeat the Social media giants – Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon..
as I see its good potential, i also fear what harm it can do to us, social network users.
The only thing I can do is trust Google to come up with a safe one that will not put us in any harm. even emails can be bugged nowadays.
So this is the reason why my old, deactivated facebook profile shows up on a google search?
Last month it would not have shown up?
This month it does?
check out more videos about social search here on my blog http://bit.ly/14rYJZ