Last week at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Google’s Marissa Mayer took the stage for two reasons. The first was to formally announce the Google/Twitter search deal, but the second was the show off a new product: Google Social Search. The on-stage demonstration was interesting, but left a lot of questions unanswered. Today, the Google Labs experiment goes live, and we’ll get those answers.
Social Search essentially pulls in information from social networks to augment Google search results. But a major question is: What social networks get pulled it? While the experiment isn’t quite live yet, it would seem that from the video below made by Google’s Matt Cutts, Social Search, at least at first, will be able to include results from Twitter, FriendFeed, Picasa, Blogger, and Google Reader.
The last three are obvious since Google owns all of those. Twitter seems obvious too because of the new Google/Twitter search deal. FriendFeed is an interesting one though since Facebook bought that service in August. As expected, it doesn’t appear that Facebook data will play a big role in Social Search (if any), as Google and Facebook continue their social profile stand-off. Cutts makes it clear that public data is the key to all of this, and Facebook doesn’t exactly have the most public information. That’s too bad since Facebook is, after all, the largest social network.
Cutts explains that the idea behind all of this is to utilize your “social circle.” The key to populating this social circle is your Google Public Profile. On this profile, the different social networking profiles you list yourself as being a member of will be a signal to Google to scour those networks for social data to serve up in its new results.
Interestingly, in the second video below, explaining how Google Social Search works, a Facebook profile appears in the lists of profiles. But again, in all the experiments, no data from Facebook seems to show up.
For its social circle, Google is going deeper as well. For example, if you follow 100 people on Twitter, Google will look at their public updates when you search for things, but it will also look at the friends or your friends for even more data. This is similar to what FriendFeed has done in the past to help surface other information that may be relevant to you. Google calls this your “extended social circle.”
Google also uses your Gmail chat buddies to build out your social circle.
When it’s live, you’ll be able to find Social Search here on Google’s Experimental search page.
Update: And now it’s live.
Facebook isn’t “social” enough, DUH.
Sweet!!
Now here come the trolls bitching about Twitter content in Google search.
Matt (from the video) also has a Facebook Page, where you can find all his blog posts, status updates, and tweets. http://www.face...tts/36350343556
Hey Todd, someone else put that page up–I didn’t. My Facebook page is just http://www.face...k.com/mattcutts
Wait. So you mean with all this openness there is an increased chance of disinformation? Weird.
Facebook is included
I believe that the google facebook war is is till on remember connect and google connect two day showdown?
I think, it would be best that searching and organizing stuff be in the hands of google rather than facebook, i believe
http://thetechn...deo-and-review/
facebook is not like twitter or friendfeed,it is like media and stuff
Google Wave will replace the Facebook noise with something useful.
Facebook doesn’t want to open up their proprietary fire-hose. But Google can eventually suck it out and copy it to Open Social through the Google Browser Toolbar or something.
wave will be as signficant as google orkut. or google sites. or google talk. or google voice.
noone. i repeat, NOONE, will use it.
No one uses Google Talk or Voice? Are you stupid?
He meant no one outside of the tech crunch/geek circle uses these things. Any social aggregating serice that excludes facebook will not be successful since (duh) that’s what everyone uses.
It’s live now.
Am I the only one to have the childish urge to freeze frame the video and use a sharpie to draw Matt’s hair and goatee back on?
what is the point of this
Kill the notion of “privacy” once and for all.
At least Bing will be incorporating the Facebook stream I guess.
To me the point is search and social networks are converging to the point of where its hard to say where you will get this information in 5 years. Sure they will all still be around, but who will be biggest player? Google is favorite, but don’t underestimate Twitter.
I love how many times that first video really SCREAMS out not to alarm you or freak you the frak out about what it’ll be like to have the all of you harvested for the social circle.
Great video that shows you the inner panic and utter freakout’dom that is bound to happen as our everyday status update joins the search stream.
Microsoft owns part of facebook. what mkes you think MS would allow this? yea its legal for facebook to do it, but fb wouldnt want its main search provider and part owner to get pissed now would it
Twitter committed a suicide when they hand over their data to google.
facebook knows this, twitter wants to be bought
I believe to a large degree Google relies on following rel=”me” links and crawling public web pages in surfacing social information. So I think if someone sets their Facebook profile to be open to the public so that search engines can crawl it, that could allow that content to show up.
but who wants to do this?
it will be very interesting to see how Goog and Bing implement these real time results
Google is on the right track.
Isn’t Google Wave designed to compete with these social sites?
ehh, I dont even think the engineers who designed it know why it was designed.
Google’s bread and butter on all of their Results Pages is Sponsored Links.
This has worked perfectly in the past by keeping the Keywords Results Pages vague and simple, whilst highlighting the lucrative Sponsored Pay-per-click Links.
But now all of a sudden Google tries to throw the kitchen sink at their major business model, by adding too many whistles and bells. (Cockney saying)
Before users can even get their heads around the new Google Music Search, we are now being presented with Google Social Search.
Now the founders of Google have always been proud of the fact that they have built a Search Engine that provides millions and millions of relevant Keywords Links.
Especially as a huge percentage of these relevant Keywords Links are the lucrative Sponsored Links.
But from today they want to integrate your Friends thoughts into your Keywords Results to help you come to a more comprehensive decision.
So say for example I want to search for the new Motorola Droid Smartphone and within my Google Social Search Keywords Results page I see a link to my good buddy Bud, who is saying on his Twitter page ‘The new Motorola Droid Smartphone sucks!’.
The first thing I am going to do is get in touch with Bud. Find out why this Droid Smartphone sucks – and totally ignore any other links on this Keywords Results Page, especially the Sponsored Links.
Maybe I am not seeing the complete picture as to why Google is launching this new Social Search model. Perhaps it is to counteract against a possible new Bing Social Search Model.
But this smacks of exactly what Coca Cola did in the 1980’s when they launched ‘New Coke’. A very bad idea.
Another hit by Google and leaving others far behind it …
Good job ..
Cheers,
Daina
Wat’s with the PORN reference at 1:52… wat a creep
Google seems to be spreading themselves too thin. I respect their constant need to innovate, but you can only go so far. Google wants to change the way we send messages (wave / gmail). They want to change the way we access the web (Chrome / Android). Dont forget bout Google Docs. Oh yeah, u cant forget bout Adwords and Adsense. Youtube is also in the mix. Oh yeah, google maps. Umm, let me see, now theres the “Social Search” idea. Dont forget Images, News, Shopping, Groups, Books, Scholar, Finance, Blogs, Calendar, Photos and the Ever growing Google Labs…
Google wants to do and be everything. But do which one well?
Doing and being everything seems to be what got Microsoft in trouble a couple of times (monopoly). I think they should focus on what they do best (search) and give every other innovator out there a chance to build a product that doesnt stand a chance with google in the picture.
Surely the more services offered will lead to wider appeal and adoption?! Social Search doesn’t care about the largest social network….
This is just a clear sign of where things are heading when it comes to search and social communication online.
Does anybody know when Google added links to deactivated Facebook profiles?
I think I asked that question wrong. I had a deactivated Facebook account, but at that time I deactivated, I did not remove the connections or friends. So recently searching my name brings up my old contacts with my picture.
But I have not noticed this until recently.
So I was wondering if the recent changes Google made could have caused that.