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Social Networking, Facebook, Flickr, Google, search, social media, Social Networking, twitter, youtube
Social Search: What Are My Friends Saying – Right Now? November 19th, 2009
No Comments Through social media, we’re becoming more and more connected than ever before. We’re sharing opinions, posting links that we find important, and holding conversations in social spaces. Many of us consider our friends and social networks as a primary source for information, and especially trust their opinion over a stranger’s. For example, if I become a fan of a company and join their group or if I give a restaurant a rating, my friends are likely to take note.
The connection between search and real-time data from social media is becoming more of a reality. At the recent Web 2.0 Summit, Google announced a Google Labs experiment called Social Search. Users are provided with more personally relevant search results.
Here’s how it works: If you have a Google profile and you’ve connected your profile to your social networking sites, Google can auto-detect your circle of friends on services like Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, del.icio.us, FriendFeed, and many others. When you opt into this feature and perform a Google search, Social Search will appear at the bottom of your standard Google search results page, displaying relevant comments and links from your social circle.
An interesting twist to the story is that Facebook – one of the world’s largest and fastest growing social networks – is not in partnership with Google, meaning you won’t see your friend’s Facebook posts in a Google Social Search. Instead, Facebook joined forces with Microsoft’s Bing. You’ll find a Bing-powered web search on Facebook. One important note to marketers is that both Google and Bing will be indexing Twitter posts, meaning your company may now have an even greater reason to have a plan to become part of that conversation.
Aside from using search engines like Google and Bing, Social Search can also take place directly on social networking sites. YouTube is the second largest search engine over Google, and Twitter and Facebook include real-time and social search functions that pull the latest buzz on any topic or current event. The major difference is that search results include input from the entire social network, not just our personal contacts.
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