Google Launches Social Search

Google introduced its new Social Search concept  at the Web 2.0 Summit last week. Right on target this week, Google introduced a new Google Labs experiement called Google Social Search, “a way to find online content authored by friends and personal contacts using a Google search”.You can try it out by signing in to your Google account, going to Google Labs and clicking on the button to join the experiment.

Google is big lately with the tutprial or explanatory videos for its new services and apps so here is Google’s Video explaining how it works:

Google explains that essentially :

Google will look for people in your Gmail or Google Talk contacts lists, Google Reader articles, people linked to through your Google Profile — from sites like Twitter and FriendFeed — and people listed in Google Contacts. Then it includes posts and commentary written by these people, when appropriate and relevant, in your Google searches.

This can be a little disconcerting but Google technical lead Maureen Heymans and Google product manager Murali Viswanathan emphasize

that this isn’t some new form of privacy invasion. “All the information that appears as part of Google Social Search is published publicly on the Web — you can find it without Social Search if you really want to,” they said. “What we’ve done is surface that content together in one single place to make your results more relevant.

They contend that Google Social Search also provides a way to see only search results from one’s social circle.