What is Google Social Search?
Google just launched a new addition to their search tool which allows users to incorporate their social networking accounts such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to their Google Search experience. When you search for a topic that someone in your social community has tweeted about or posted photos of, you’ll see these results in addition to the standard search results.
Getting Started
For now, Google’s Social Search is in it’s experimental stage and available for users to try out in the Google Labs.
- Go to Google Labs - http://www.googlelabs.com/
- Click on “Google Social Search”
- Click on “Join This Experiment”
Adding Social Links to your Google Profile
- Follow this link to access your Google Profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/ and fill out your profile information
- Either set up a profile, or sign in to access your current profile
- Scroll down to find your “links” area, and add your social networks to the list of displayed links
At this point, you should be ready to start searching.
Search Tip: By clicking on the “Show Options” button (diagram below), you will expand the search toolbar. This will allow you to narrow search by date and type. You will now find a link to “Social” here, as well.
Click here to watch the video: Demo of Google’s Social Search Project
Update 10/27/09: As of 7:00 PM EST, many users are posting messages into the Google forum that Social Search is currently not finding results. I’m sure Google’s working on this issue as I type.
Update 10/28/09: I received an email this morning which discusses why social results are not appearing as we’d hoped. Apparently, if you want to see results from someone in your social community, they too must have a Google Profile with their networking accounts linked. Google is looking for some other ways to track these results, but this is it for now. If you found this article helpful, please RT to your Twitter community. Happy searching!
If you found this article helpful, please RT to your Twitter community.
Happy searching!
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by angeladenby: Getting Started with Google Social Search | Java Social Networking http://ow.ly/wY8P…
Thanks for the clear instructions. So far I’m finding the social search experiement useless.
Hi Patti,
Thanks for the comment. Some of us in the experimental group are following each other on Twitter to see if we can get build a community for the Social Search function. If you (or any other readers, for that matter) follow me, I’ll follow you back: http://www.twitter.com/angeladenby
Here’s a link to the group thread if you want to post your twitter link there, as well: http://groups.google.com/group/google-experimental-search/browse_thread/thread/b0e8c046d2da4f30