As I mentioned in my blog posts on Universal Search and Personalized Search, Google has been working on personalizing its search results utilizing social media and networking sites.

Google Social Search is meant to help searchers find the answers to their questions from their own social circle, a set of online friends and contacts they trust.  The idea is that content from your friends and social contacts is more likely to be relevant to you.

Google uses various sources to identify your connections and the relevant social search results such as:

• Direct connections (friends, family or coworkers) from your Google chat buddies and contacts from Gmail or Google Talk
• Direct connections from links listed on your Google profile such as Twitter, FriendFeed and LinkedIn
• Secondary connections that are publicly associated with your direct connections
• Posts from your Google Reader subscriptions

Google keeps updating your social graph every time you make changes to your connections.

Google Social Search

The social results only show up on search engine results pages when you are logged in to your Google account.  Currently the social search results for a particular search term is being listed at the bottom of the results page under “Results from people in your social circle” heading.  The content shown within Social Search is publicly available on the web through Google and other search engines. Social Search simply uses content from your social circle to provide a more personalized search results.

Here are some of the types of content you might see:

• Websites, blogs, public profiles, and other content linked from your friends’ Google profiles
• Web content, such as status updates, tweets, reviews, from social networks that your friends have listed in their Google profiles
• Images posted publicly from your social circle on Picasa Web
• Relevant articles from the RSS feeds you are subscribed to through Google Reader

The impact of social search on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be huge.  This means companies need to be more involved in attracting audience to their social profiles, get them subscribe to their RSS feeds or add them to their social bookmarking sites.

There has been so many talks about social media and its impact on our society, businesses and marketing.  Here are some interesting stats on social media gathered by Erik Qualman the author of socialnomics.

Statistics presented in this video shows the amazing growth of social media websites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

Twitter seems to have finally found a way to monetize its social media platform. Following their deals with Google and Microsoft to provide them with real time search, there are rumours that they are ready to launch their advertising platform.

Google has been long a believer of ad relevancy and they pioneered the concept of Quality Score to promote and reward the most relevant ads. Twitter seems to follow the footsteps of Google.   According to Twitter`s head of product management, they are planning to make the ads relevant and useful so that they are seamless and users do not think of them as ads. 

We have to wait and see if they can succeed in incorporating the ads in the tweets without negatively impacting user experience.

Social Media Consultant

As I mentioned in my previous article on real time search, there would be more real time news feed added to the sources of real time search.  Google just announced that starting this week, they added the content of My Space to real time search.  Now Google provides a pool of news, photos and blog posts published by MySpace users.   Google ranks the updates by relevancy and freshness.  

Social Media Consultant

With the ever growing popularity of twitter and its role in providing real time news that search engines were not traditionally able to provide, Google decided to strike a deal with twitter and include real time search results on their SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

Real time search is the new addition to the Google Universal search which can potentially impact the face of web marketing and SEO. The real time results take up a significant portion of SERPs and can potentially push down your organic rankings below the first fold. This shows the importance of taking real time search seriously and join the micro blogging stream.

Currently real time searches seem to show mostly for hot trends and event related searches. However, we have to see how this will trend moving forward.

Even though twitter is the application that is most known for providing real time search, there are many other applications that provide micro blogging and RT search including but not limited to facebook, friendfeed, and Orkut which could join the fleet of real time search.

Social Media Consultant