This article was published on October 22, 2009

Google to launch a new product: Social Search


Google to launch a new product: Social Search

googleMarissa Mayer, Google’s Vice-President of Search, has just announced the arrival of a new upcoming Google labs product: Social Search.

The product will import news and feeds from your various profiles into one place. Yes, Friendfeed should ring a bell right about now.

The application should slot neatly in with Google Profiles, a tool we’ve always believed would result in a social platform of sorts. Social Search will blend updates from the social networks you have added to your Google Profile and along with those updates, Google will let you search the entire Google network for results.

The tool will connect neatly with your Google contacts. When you search different items, Google will show you how you’re connected to other people, whether it’s through e-mail, Twitter or FriendFeed. At the bottom of the page, you’ll see results with filtering options: blog posts, photos or reviews created by your friends.

To use social search, you have to be signed into Google and it will determine who you’re connected to in part by looking at your Gmail contacts.

This news comes on the same day that Google and Bing announced that it had entered into an agreement with Twitter to bring real-time “tweets” to search results. Once again it seems Google has outdone it’s most fierce competitors. Part of me likes to think they made “social search” up today to intentionally do so.

Social Search will be launching as an opt-in project in the next few weeks.

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