With Google Social Search the search engine giant takes a big leap towards becoming the master-key to unlocking the web of social networks. But what is Google’s longer-term strategy than being a mere personalised aggregator of other peoples content?
UPDATE 10 February 2010
Google has now launched it’s biggest attack in the social networking war - Google Buzz. My first thought is that just as I was thinking in October last year, Google Buzz already have an incredibly large user base. However, it still attract people tospend time interacting on the platform. Original article follows below:
Google Social Search is a new experimental feature that lets users personalise their search results further by highlighting content from their social circle. The social circle is drawn out by Google by using available data from Gmail, Google Talk and Google Profiles.
In practise this means that if you for example research a specific product and one of your friends have recently tweeted about how excellent it is from their own experience, you are likely to see his or hers comments. This information is potentially very valuable to yourself as you know them. In contrast this search result would have been quite irrelevant to the wider audience and would likely not have ranked very well in Google’s normal search engine results.
Currently Google Social Search is only accessable via Google labs as an experimental service. And according to Norwegian site Search Divas, the feature is not yet rolled out beyond the US and UK.
Although Google Social Search is not a new social platform per se, but instead an aggregator through search that draws its power from the social graph across multiple sources, it shows that Google has the potential to become an end destination and not merely a conduit of other peoples content. This experiment has the potential to create a flood of updated Google Profiles which is a major foundation for a Google Social networking site. This trend of striving to create a “stickier” Google experience can be noticed in other experiments as well such as Google fastflip, Google Sidewiki and Google books where users don’t have to leave the site to get most of the experience.
Learn more about Google Social Search here.
Related posts:
{ 1 trackback }
{ 0 comments… add one now }