Google adds search to Google+, letting you find public or private posts

Google has today announced that it is bringing its full search product to Google+, greatly improving your ability to find things that you want to inside its new social network.

Google has added the full power of its search engine to Google+, allowing you not just to search for People, but also topics, relevant posts and content from around the web all in one go. It will continue to search for people as well, but will return them as part of results with a much larger scope.

When you search for topics it will show you people interested in those topics. Search for cooking, get profiles of chefs and pictures of food. Search for photography, get photographers that are posting about their craft and sharing their images on Google+.

These results will also include items that are private to you. So if you search for something and one of the members of your personal Circles of family or friends has shared something on that topic, you’ll see it right along with a blog post from your favorite blog.

This is a welcome change to the simple, profile-only search that Google+ was using before and is only one of several big changes that Google is implementing in Google+ today. It has also made major improvements to its Hangouts service, bringing enhancements and a move to mobile devices. The Google+ service is also now available to all so anyone interested can start trying it out.