An update to Google Social Search

[ck2]

A year ago Google promised that social searching twitter back to 2006 via would be possible "soon".

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/replay-it-google-sear...

"For our initial release, you can explore tweets going back to February 11, 2010, and soon you’ll be able to go back as far as the very first tweet on March 21, 2006"

But the search is still limited to 2010 as of February 2011.

I wonder if the reason is technical or "political" ?

[korussian]

I'd like to be able to add not just my own accounts from other websites (like twitter), but those of others as well. So, for example, if one of Brian's Twitter folks posted a video, I want that ranking higher in my search results. It would be nice to be able to add Brian's twitter to my social search.

[pestaa]

Google is starting to walk the social path, but it's child's shoes yet. I'm sure the algorithm will be able to analyze friends of friends.

[bretthopper]

It's amazing to me how Twitter has become such a valuable and useful source of information compared to Facebook. Especially considering the 140 character limit.

So I have no problem with Twitter being incorporated into my search results.

[spravin]

It is because Twitter posts are public, and free for Google to use, unlike Facebook posts.

[kulkarnic]

I wonder how exactly these results figure into the ranking algorithm. How authoritative does a link shared by a "friend" on twitter have to be in the page-rank sense, for instance? Depending on this threshold, it might suddenly become even more important for a website to have a good social media presence (alternatively, spamming on twitter might become more attractive).

Also, I think Bing launched something similar over a year ago, at least from Twitter and Faceboook (see http://www.discoverbing.com/facebook/) .

[bvi]

This is several steps in the right direction. Good stuff.

One thing though - some people in my social circle are (obviously) more important than others. Is there a way that links from these folks are ranked higher than those from less important people? If not, this is something that should be configurable by the user (e.g. "See more links from Jack [x]" or "See less links from Mary [x]").

[pestaa]

I really hope this will get further developed, because it can blur SEO as we know it today.

Not that experts will not be able to utilize their network of site owners, but the results will be even more personalized, and when nobody can permanently rank #1 on Google for any keyword, searchers win.

[spravin]

I hope Google learns from Buzz, and makes this an "explicit" opt-in. The blog post says that it will be only enabled if the user's Google account is signed in. But a user's Google account could be signed in simply because he is logged in to Gmail.

[sskates]

I wonder how Greplin feels about this, it's certainly covering some of the same territory that they're in.

[clare]

Exact my thought too, Greplin seems to be open to public signup yesterday, and it will be really interesting to see which social search will take off. Google seems to provide a superset of what Greplin provides (your own social data plus your social network's data), and Google definitely has the advantage of being a bigger name, which might mitigate some users' concern about privacy or security; on the other hand, Greplin is really focused on this one particular service and employs a really straightforward approach, which might actually be more preferrable to other users. Google's social search might be lost in a whole slew of other services, unless they focus on marketing and education about it.

[barista]

Good to see them catching up with Bing. Bing has been doing this for some time now.

[bkaid]

Google claims not to take a political stance yet this blog post features a screenshot of President Obama on The Daily Show?