What Is Google Social Search?

As we become increasingly connected online, we start to build around ourselves a community of people that we have regular contact with and websites where we spend much of our time. This is called our social network.

Google determines your social network based on the connections found in your public Google profile (http://www.google.com/ profiles).

How Does Social Search Work?

To see social search results in action, login to your Google account, then run a search.
If you want to see more social results, click on the *Show Options* link at the top left of the page and click on the *Social* link in the side menu under *All Results*. This will bring up search results sourced entirely from your social network (Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, Google reader or chat and so on…).

You’ll also see a list of your friends and connections under the menu heading *All People*.

How Do You Take Advantage of Social Search?

1. If you haven’t already done so, create a Gmail (http://www.gmail.com/) account and create and flesh out your Google Profile (http://www.google.com/profiles) immediately.

2. Join more social sites if you want your content to appear in the SERPs of your direct and secondary social circle networks, particularly the primary ones Twitter, Flickr and FriendFeed.

3. Optimize your social media content (tweets, FB and LinkedIn status updates, blog feeds, etc.) for target keywords to ensure your social content is shown in a wider number of social circle SERPs.

4. Gmail and Chat contacts get top billing in your social circle so choose your Gmail buddies wisely or remove them from your profile altogether.

5. Consider the type of social content that is popular and most often shared within your networks. Concentrate on building similar content in your public social media profiles to ensure it gets syndicated via your social circle.

6. If Universal Search wasn’t enough of a punch in the gut to convince you to optimize your multimedia content, consider Social Search to be that punch placed a little lower. Your shared photos just became another content channel.

7. Become more picky about who you follow and what social feeds you subscribe to. They have just become influencers in your every day search results.

What if I Don’t Like It?

You can control what results you do and don’t see under your social search results. You can choose to either
remove a social network from your Google profile (such as Twitter or Facebook), or remove a specific contact from your network.

You can ignore the social results at the bottom of the page when signed in, or if you don’t wish to see any social search results at all, simply conduct your searches while signed out of your Google account.

It’s important to note that Google doesn’t make your social circle public e.g. publish your list of chat buddies. It simply adds your buddies’ public information to YOUR social circle.