Back to Tech Blog homepageGoogle Social Search, out today, is one of those ideas that is more interesting for what it might foreshadow than what it actually delivers.
We’ve all been conditioned by now into thinking that Google=Algorithms, and that Facebook=Social. That dichotomy falls away with a service like Google Social Search, a demonstration of how algorithms can make use of social connections that lie within reach of Google’s crawlers.
The Social Search service works by trying to divine who might be included in your social circle (broadly defined), then drawing from any relevant material these people have posted on public websites when you search for a particular term. These “social” results appear in a separate section of the search results, near the bottom of the page.
For Google, this makes eminent sense. It will never be able to “out-Facebook” Facebook, which now has more than 300m users, but it can draw on its users’ social connections from a variety of other sources.
It can also play to its own strengths, applying its relevancy algorithms to find useful content and then integrating this into its broader search results.
For now, that means divining a person’s personal connections from services like Twitter, FriendFeed (ironically, recently bought by Facebook) and Flickr. The service also draws inferences from Gmail accounts (only people who appear in your chat list or you have added to a special group) and Google Reader (it assumes anyone whose blog you are following is worthy of being included in your circle). Not Facebook.
This is still one of those experimental services that sits in Google Labs and may or may not become part of the core service. Among the issues Google faces: can it overcome knee-jerk privacy concerns, can it find truly relevant information from your wider social circle, and can it present this in a useful and comprehensible way?
That points to a bigger paradox. Google has long been working on the principle that the more sources of information it can add to its all-purpose search engine, the more useful that engine becomes and the harder it will be for anyone else to compete. But the more it adds, the harder it is to get attention for all the new “features” it is adding.
Take just a few recent examples: Book Search draws in snippets from the company’s ever-expanding archive of digital works; audio search (expected to be unveiled later this week) will link directly to music; and Twitter search (announced in principle last week) will show tweets in real time. Now, social search.
Each of these has to be found a home in the company’s ever-expanding “universal” search results page.
Still, the idea behind social search is intriguing. It highlights an alternative vision to Facebook, one in which Google is promising to make social information truly useful by drawing it into the environment it dominates: search.
Incidentally, for a deeper dive into Google Social Search, Danny Sullivan has tried it out.
Tags: Google Social Search
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