How Google Social Search Works

Google Social Search is an “experimental” feature you can turn on find publicly available web content from your “social circle.”

This sounds kind of like the Facebook “social grid,” except it pulls info from across many other web services like Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr, your Blog, and thousands of others.

The online social services you belong to create an implicit network of connections called your “social circle.” In the video below, Matt Cutts describes how this all works.

How does Google know your social circle?

How does Google know your social circle? It looks at your social connections and web content like blogs, status updates, tweets and pictures.

Then it pulls these different pieces of your social circle together in one place and surfaces this content in your search results.

It pulls them from three primary locations:

1. Your public Google Profile (which includes links to your social services)
2. Your Google Chat buddies
3. Google Reader – the blogs you subscribe to

Google takes its regular web index data, and annotates it with information from these social networks, then surfaces public content from your social circle at the bottom of your web search results.

What if you don’t want Google pulling this information together?

Your Google Profile seems to be the “hub” for most of the information it finds to augment search results with social info.

You don’t have to create one, and if you do have one, you can control which links to social networks you add to your profile. Matt Cutts stresses in the video that they are only crawling information that is already publicly available.

I think it would be very cool if they also looked at location information. For example, if my social connections had a Google Maps profile in the Google Local Business center maybe that information could show up as well.

One thing that seems strange to me – why doesn’t it leverage anything from Google Friend Connect? It seems like it should consider my GFC friends as part of the social circle.

Try it out and let me know your impressions, I’d love to hear them!