Google Adds Social Search to Labs - Reviews by PC Magazine
Google Adds Social Search to Labs: Via Reviews by PC Magazine.
On the heels of Google and Microsoft's decisions to incorporate Twitter postings into Google.com and Bing, Google on Monday announced an experimental Labs feature that will peruse a user's social networks for search results.
Google Social Search is intended to "find more relevant public content from your broader social circle," Google said in a blog post.
Social Search will pull from Google services like Gmail and Reader, as well as social networks like Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. To participate, create a Google Profile and add links to social networking sites you want Google to search. You can then activate Social Search via Google Experimental Labs.
The next time you conduct a search in Google.com, click the "show options" tab atop the search results, and then click "social" on the left-hand bar. Results will be pulled from Google products and any social networks you've added to your Google Profile.
I added my Twitter account to my profile, for example, and then searched "PCMag" on Google. Clicking "social" pulled up links to our latest PCMag Radio podcast, recent reviews, and Tweets from co-workers.
Similarly, searching for "iPhone" pulled up blog posts from people on Twitter in which they mentioned the iPhone. Many of these results, however, came from friends of friends on Twitter - some of whom I don't know. That might shed light on something I'd not of heard of before, but could also be annoying to wade through results from strangers.
Google stressed that private information will not be made public via Social Search. "You can find it without Social Search if you really want to. What we've done is surface that content together in one single place to make your results more relevant," Google said.
The service should be available to all Google users by the end of the day.
Last week, Microsoft and Google said they would incorporate Twitter posts in Bing and Google.com search results. Microsoft has launched a beta version of the program on Bing, but Google has not yet deployed it.
Read Original Article:(Via Reviews by PC Magazine.)
Recent blog posts
- EFF Asks Court to Suppress Evidence Illegally Gathered From Password-Protected Phone
- Google Superbowl Ad Explains The Need for Search Privacy
- EFF Fights for Cell Phone Users' Privacy in Thursday Hearing
- Identifying John Doe: It might be easier than you think
- ShmooCon: Inside FarmVille's sinister underbelly
- More Details on the Chinese Attack Against Google (Schneier)
- The top 5 mistakes of privacy awareness programs
- ShmooCon: P2P snoopers know what's in your wallet
- Can you trust Chinese computer equipment?
- Authors Guild: ‘To RIAA or Not to RIAA’