19 May 2011 | Author: C. Tate

Google extends social search across the globe

In a bid to raise its social profile, Google today added 19 more languages to its social search feature, increasing its reach to more countries around the world.


Social Search for Google has been around since 2009 and has allowed users, when logged on to their Gmail account, to see information from social networks in their search results. This works by crawling the user's Gmail contacts and suggesting connections to people listed as friends on Facebook and more.

A Google software engineer, Yosser Coppel, announced the roll out on Mountain View's official blog:

"In 2009 we first introduced Social Search on google.com as an experimental feature designed to help you find more relevant information from your friends and the people you care about. Since then we've been making steady improvements to connect you with more people and more relevant web results. Today, we're bringing Social Search to more users around the globe."

However this development has been greeted with concern by another big internet player, Facebook, who recently hired a PR company to derail the search seraph's social initiatives through bad press.


At the time, Dan Lyons of the Daily Beast said Facebook employed the company to pit them against Google for two reasons: "First, because it believes Google is doing some things in social networking that raise privacy concerns; second, and perhaps more important, because Facebook resents Google's attempts to use Facebook data in its own social-networking service."

The ongoing Facebook-Google animosity highlights how the social factor has become much more important in search.

Microsoft has just announced Bing's greater integration with Facebook, citing research that found 90 per cent of people seek advice from friends and family when making important decisions. They wanted their search results to reflect this 'friend effect'.

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