17 May 2006 | Author: Chris Liversidge

Google gets social as the Google Notebook Goes Live

Social search has been defined in many ways; some see del.icio.us as the shining light of the concept, others prefer to talk about the usefulness of Digg.com for filtering the flood of tech news stories that break every minute on the internet. But Google has now approached the concept in a deceptively simple way: the Google Notebook.

It works as a browser extension and once installed sits quietly in the lower edge of the viewing pane. You can now simply open and close the notebook while browsing without navigating away from the page you are currently on. If you wish to add the current page to your notebook you simply click on the 'Add Note' Feature and tag the page with your own description.

So far we haven't encountered anything particularly new, but the social search aspect enters the fray when we opt to make our notes public. We also then have the functionality to search other live notebooks, using the terms Google Notebook users have decided upon for the pages we have tagged.



















Search functionality is limited at the moment, and until uptake has increased and users have tagged a sufficient number of pages, the relevancy of pages thrown up will be scattershot. However this is clearly an indication of Google's increasing interest in the applicability of Social Search for returning more relevant results to users. Taken with the beta launch of Google Co-Op - which the bigmouthmedia newsletter covered earlier this week, and which is followable in the link to the left - it's another step forwards into a new arena for search and search engine optimisation.

As always, here at bigmouthmedia, we'll keep you posted on the latest in search.

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