Google announced a new service yesterday called Social Search which shows search results from sites owned by the searchers online friends. Currently an opt-in service but widely expected to go live over the next few months it cements the need for brands to have a Twitter account, Facebook page & a decent blog.
Data on a persons social circle is pulled from their contacts in Gmail, the people they follow on Twitter, the blogs they read on Google Reader. Google has a help centre article explaining more about how it works.
All the information that appears as part of Google Social Search is published publicly on the web — 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. The way we do it is by building a social circle of your friends and contacts using the connections linked from your public Google profile, such as the people you’re following on Twitter or FriendFeed. The results are specific to you, so you need to be signed in to your Google Account to use Social Search. If you use Gmail, we’ll also include your chat buddies and contacts in your friends, family, and coworkers groups. And if you use Google Reader, we’ll include some websites from your subscriptions as part of your social search results.
The next generation of search
At present Google is only including these results as a universal search element in the same way they embed news results. However there is little doubt that in the same way news results are giving priority for certain queries we will start to see results from our social circles being given a boost in the normal search results too.
This makes perfect sense, if I follow a brand on Twitter or are fans of a site on Facebook then they are more relevant to me than another brand who happens to have more links.
Optimising for social search
Take a look at the data points Google is using and make sure you are making attempts to increase your followers, subscribers & friends in each of those areas. It’s not easy for brands to be social but those that manage it are likely to reap the rewards.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
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This is stupid. Google have jumped the shark. Hopefully it isn’t made mainstream and hopefully people don’t hand over all their twitter, facebook etc data.
More comments from Tim ParsonsI think Social Media Marketing will become huge for brands and medium sized companies, it may even overshadow SEO eventually.
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Thanks for the post and for sharing the news Patrick, this 2009 is the year of social networking and Google is also affected by its charm.
More comments from tag44Have to embrace change. Social networking is that big
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