28 January 2010 | Author: J. Morton News Editor

Google Social Search goes beta

Google's efforts to integrate personalised social media results into web searches took a step forward this week, as the company upgraded its social search to a user-accessible beta version.

The function had previously been limited to a Google Labs project, but now will be available publicly. It looks set to integrate blog posts, tweets and photos, amongst other content, into a user's web search results. A posting on Google's official blog gives the example of searching for baby products:

"If one of my friends has written a blog where he talks about a great baby shop he found in Mountain View, this might appear in my social results," read the Wednesday post from Maureen Heymans, Technical Lead for Social Search, and Terran Melconian, Technical Lead for Social Image Search.

"I could probably find other reviews, but my friend's blog is more relevant because I know and trust the author."

Social search results will be differentiated from public web searches with a heading of 'results from your social circle'.

Whether this is a direct strike at social media field leaders Facebook and Twitter remains to be seen, but in order to get full functionality from the service, a user is directed to create a Google Profile. This profile requests and offers similar information to other social media platforms, such as contact details, personal statements and photos. Users must also complete a predetermined amount of information about themselves to proceed. Links to various social media outlets are also needed for the search to work.

Writing in the blog post, Heymans and Melconian acknowledged the search still requires improvement, and thus the company has left it with a beta tag.

For those still left with questions, Google also posted an instructional YouTube video on the new service.

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