Have you heard about Google’s controversial Social Search feature? Well, according to Google’s blog, the company will roll out its Social Search feature to 19 more languages by next week. Basically, Social Search is a feature that was launched by Google in 2009 and involves combining regular search results with publicly available data that were created by your friends’ social media activities. This is actually more of an experimental feature that is designed to help users out there in finding more relevant information from the people that you know such as your friends and family members.
However, this feature has become the subject of a lot of controversies lately as Facebook was revealed to have hired a PR company that will apparently push some negative stories about the Google’s Social Search in the press. According to Facebook, Google’s practices have caused some serious privacy concerns and that they are not really happy to know that Google will be able to use Facebook data for the said service without even asking their permission to do so.
Google have remained silent about this controversial issue, but it is quite noticeable lately that in its blog post about the Social Search, Facebook was not even mentioned unlike Twitter, which has been mentioned for three times. Well, Google and Facebook has been involved in some cold war lately because of the latter being discovered to be behind the anti-Google campaign being conducted by PR giant Burson-Marsteller.
Just like Google on google.com the social search results in other languages and on other domains are mixed throughout the Google results page based on their relevance. So for example, if you are looking for information about a restaurant and your friends have written a blog about a certain restaurant that they have tried, then that post will show up higher in the results together with a clear annotation and picture of your friends.
Check out this video:
Well, as mentioned above Google will be rolling out its Social Search feature in 19 different languages and apparently it will be available in more languages in the future. This will surely make the Social Search feature more useful to a lot more users out there.
(source)
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Tags: Google Social Search 2011, Google Social Search 2011 demo, Google Social Search 2011 features, Google Social Search 2011 seo
