The Google Search Tool goes Social

It was about more than a year ago that Google first began to try to acknowledge the wealth of information there was on the social networks in its search results. When you used the Google search tool to search for anything, your results page would show you links from people on Facebook that you knew and you would see results from other social networks like Twitter as well. But that was a year ago. Today, Google is taking the biggest step it has ever taken in trying to make its search more social.

The Google search tool, to most people, is their window to the web. For the most part, they know where they go on the web only because of the options Google presents to them. But still, people are beginning to accept that social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter can have some pretty important ideas for them too. For things like ideas on what books to read, for where to go for the holidays, or where to buy stuff cheaper, people find Facebook and Twitter to be far more rewarding than a simple web search. Asking their social networking friends for recommendations, they'll have their questions interpreted far better than a search engine ever could, trying to pick relevant information out of the Internet.

Starting now, your standard Google search is going to include information of the kind you would find on a social network. Actually, Google's search results have done some kind of social networking search ever since the year 2009. Back then, you could create a Google profile for yourself, and connect it to your Twitter account or your LinkedIn account. That way, when you tried to search while logged in into Google, the bottom of the search results page would show any kind of results from your social networking friends as well. The problem was that not that many people went to the trouble of creating a Google profile and searching from within their accounts. And anyway, no one ever found it all that useful. If you wanted to visit the Bahamas, what were the chances that someone you knew on Twitter or LinkedIn had been there?

Now, search for anything and the Google search tool will give you posts that everyone you know on the web on nearly every social network has posted. And it'll be a right at the top of your search results, and not just a footnote. You'll also see if there is a friend you have on a social network who happens to have posted a link that's relevant. It doesn't have to be material that they've written. If they like a link that's relevant, you'll hear about it. Think about it - if there is an article on a subject that you are searching for that a friend of yours has approved of, wouldn't you be more likely to read it? In fact, that's what the Huffington Post does.

There's just one little problem to all of this. The new social networking results that Google intends to show you will only be presented to you if it's in the public domain. Since most Facebook posts are private, Google will have no access to those.