Google Enhances Social Search, Excludes Facebook

Posted: February 22, 2011

Google’s Social Search experiment has finally come off age. The online search giant yesterday announced that Social Search results will no longer be relegated to the bottom of Google search pages. Instead, relevant posts from the social media accounts of a user’s friends will now be integrated into the list of results. The social search results include activity on Flickr, Quora, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube which would also play a huge role in determining a site’s page rank.

The most noticeable omission in Google Social Search Results is Facebook. IMO, it’s unsurprising that Google chose to omit Facebook from the scheme of things because the world’s leading search giant and the world’s most popular social network have for long been engaged in a high profile war for control of the Internet.

Google is increasingly getting social

Google’s latest move is a part of its long-term social integration strategy to provide more information from the people they have connected to publicly or privately. IMO, it’s a good move and is likely to benefit users as well as Google. First, it encourages users to sign up on social networks with their Google accounts there by increasing the search giant’s subscriber base. On the other hand, users (especially business users) get high page ranks in search engine results.

Google says social connections can affect the ranking of some search results. Social Search results are clearly marked with a note and a picture, so users can easily recognize whose tweets, LinkedIn profiles or Quora updates they’re looking at.

How to use Google Social Search?

To use Social Search, you’ll need to link your social media accounts publicly via your Google Profile. Alternatively, you can make these connections private with a new setting in your Google account. Google will automatically search for other public accounts you might have and recommend that you link to them. IMO, the private connections feature is much needed and Facebook surely needs to take a few privacy lessons from Google.

The social search results will also include any links that are shared by users in their social media updates. Therefore, it warrants that users be careful about what links they share, or else it may well cause some embarrassment.

Though social search results have existed for quiet some time, they were positioned at the bottom of the page, making them less likely to be noticed.

Google vs. Bing: Why Facebook is excluded from Google’s search results?

Ever since Bing introduced Facebook ‘Like’ Integration, Google abandoned deep Facebook integration, in favor of Quora, Flickr and Twitter. Microsoft has always played a big brother to Facebook. In contrast, Facebook and Google have been at loggerheads at several occasions in the last two years. It would have been nice to have Facebook “likes” included in Google Social Search Results. Perhaps, a classic case of If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

Biz Tip Source: Smedio

About the Author: Douglas Idugboe is a New Media and Social Web Evangelist, Bestselling Author, Marketing Strategist, Speaker and Trainer. You can find Douglas on Twitter.