Today you may tapping your latest request into the friendly white abyss that is the Google Search Box, just like any other day right?
WRONG.
Today, (if you are logged into your Google Account) you may just see a little something different in your search results. A tweet from a friend, a blog post from someone you subscribe to on Blogger, a Flickr Photo from your favourite photographer or maybe a post from a brand you follow on Facebook. Why?
Because as of today Google is beginning to roll out it’s Social Search feature to Google Account holders. (See the video below for a demo).
The recommendation economy thrives on the fact that we trust our friends and those we follow more than advertising or even editorial content from those we don’t know. However until now the search results we have been served up for many years have always been somewhat lacking of that social integration.
Google’s actions in this area show that one of the biggest powerhouses on the web believe this too – that we value what our friends share, like, post and blog about, just as much (or maybe even more) than the stuff that SEO’s and PPC specialists have been trying to push to the top of our daily search grind.
Over To You:
Do you want to see your social feed in your search results?
Will you be using Google Social Search?
As always thoughts on a postcard… or just in the comments 
I knew eventually Google would catch on to opinion optimisation
It would be very interesting to know what specific factors the social search algorithms could use to start ranking friends. I imagine it would be much like PageRank, taking into account frequency and quality of interactions, from publicly available sources such as blogs and Twitter.
Give it time, and I’m sure that we’ll be able to discern these factors based on patterns in results.
As for your closing questions: yes, because I do indeed value my friends’ opinions. And as long as I use Google, I don’t think I have a choice, because I see no option to exclude social search results.
However, it is possible to select *only* social search results – which is a useful, if somewhat creepy, way of reading what my friends have said about something.
May I ask your closing questions back to you?