Brian Beehler – Social Media Talk

Today, Google announced that their rolling out a new experiment on Google Labs called Google Social Search. It will help you find more relevant public content from your family, friends and contacts. While surfing, I tend to search for content my social circle has published and to date its been extremely difficult to find that type of information easily from one simple location. With Social Search, Google finds relevant content and highlights it for me at the bottom of my search results.

My first question is, “how is Google going to show content published by my connections based on my search results”. First off, Google explains that I’ll need to be signed in to my Google Account to use Social Search. Once logged in, I’ll need to build a social circle from a combination of my Gmail chat buddies, Gmail contacts, family and co-worker groups, and people I’m publicly connected to on other social sites (such as Twitter and FriendFeed). Now that Google knows my social circle they’ll be able to present results relevant to me thus connecting me to my family, friends, and contacts published web content. My thought is “pretty cool” but is it really. Once Google knows who I am, my social circle, and being the largest search engine in the world, it can easily present me with relevant content. It may not seem to complicated but what appeals to me is it brings it all together in one place.. 

I’ll be testing out the new feature over the next few days. Give it a try and let me know what you think. I would love to share your thoughts with my visitors.