Google have released a live version of their “Social Search” within Google Labs. They are looking for people to use it and offer their feedback. It works by searching data in your “Social Circle” – see the video below.
After the recent focus on “real-time” search it is important to point out that this is not it, but you tell Google where your profiles are and they do the rest. It shows posts, updates or reviews that people in your “Social Circle” have made that are relevant to your search and shows them alongside usual listings.
It appears that the idea behind it is that the opinions or views of those that you network with will be more relevant to you as they should, in theory, have similar things in common. This idea does raise a few of issues though:
- It assumes that everyone in your immediate social circle have things in common and their contacts too. In reality users of social networking sites often add contacts/friends to increase their numbers or for political reasons. For those of you who are here from my LinkedIn profile I value you all
- Related to the above point it does not seem to take into account that you will communicate with some contacts more than others. By definition the opinions and posts of these people should be ranked higher than the others
- Some people may not be comfortable with their posts being made publicly searchable or they may not want other people to be aware of their contacts.
Saying that it is an interesting development and we need companies like Google to keep pushing the boundaries and to explore new avenues and I see this as a welcome addition. Oh and it’s only a matter of time before we get that real-time search.
Tags: Google, Real-time search, Search, Social Networking
