Social Search Comes to Google

Social media continues to make waves as search is placing more and more emphasis on the social aspects of the web. Last week Microsoft announced partnerships with Facebook and Twitter, only to have Google make the same announcement hours later. Now, Google is expanding its use of search by announcing the launch of social search. While plans to launch Social Search were explained last week, the application itself has now launched within Google Labs.

As ReadWriteWeb discusses, “Social Search looks into a user’s social network profiles and displays relevant links and status updates that members of their own social network have shared at the bottom of the default search results page”. Google’s goal in its implementation of social search is to make a user’s search experience more relevant to their needs.

How does Social Search work? Users will need one of the following: Gmail contacts, Google Reader subscriptions or a Google Profile. Of the three, the Google profile currently plays the biggest part. ReadWriteWeb states that “based on the information in your Google Profile, Google can auto-detect your social networking profiles and your friends on services like Flickr, FriendFeed, YouTube, Reddit, Digg, del.icio.us, BrightKite, and many others”.

How will this affect both social networks and Google?