Recently, Google (on the heels of Bing) started to incorporate and display Twitter conversations as part of their universal search results – obviously in an effort to ensure its search results reflect what is (or may be) useful to its users and to deliver an even more complete search experience and, in the process, reinforce and expand its share of the search market.
Personally, I haven’t found that the inclusion of Tweets in the search engine results pages (SERPs) have been beneficial and think that they actually have added to the “clutter factor” on what were once very clean and easy-to-read pages.
In any case, it looks like Google is planning to expand its presence in the social media search space even further – and more meaningfully – with the development of Google Social Search.
Google Social Search will add, display, and highlight relevant search results from people in your social network circles. This means that if you search for information on “best dog training tips” and one of your Facebook friends (or connections from other social web circles) has blogged or tweeted about “best dog training tips” then the listing is likely to appear in the search results.
The benefit of this is obvious: recommendations from friends or colleagues are considerably more trustworthy – as any study (and your own personal experience) will tell you – than those from strangers or “pages” on the web. Add to this the fact that you have the ability to reach out to your friend or colleague for more information and you’ve got a pretty powerful search tool at your disposal. And Google, as a result, tightens its stranglehold on the search market.
The video below is a quick demonstration of Google Social Search. You can also head over to Google Experiments to sign up and participate.
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