Link spam and other black hat SEO techniques can sometimes skew search results and bring back irrelevent content. By relying less on link structure of web pages Google Social Search helps you discover relevant content from your social connections, a set of your online friends and contacts. According to Google content from your friends and acquaintances is sometimes more relevant and meaningful to you than content from any random person. For example, an online movie review is useful, but a movie review from your best friend can be even better. There is increased relevance because each result has been selected by users and not by SEO techniques.
If you have a Google account and you are signed in to Google, your search results may highlight relevant content that’s created by or shared by your social connections. Your Social Search experience is personal and the highlighted content that you see is unique to you and your social connections. Social search therefore leverages the network of trusted individuals by providing an indication of whether they thought a particular result was good or bad.
Your search results will display Websites, blogs, and other content that’s shared by or created by your friends, images that are shared by your social connections, relevant articles from your Google Reader subscriptions, profiles of people you know beneath results for social sites like Twitter and Flickr, and web content that has been recommended or shared by others using the +1 button.
To see which results are social search results look at the annotations on search results. For example, beneath a movie review shared by your friend Joe, you may see Joe’s name and picture. You can click Joe’s name to see his profile page, and hover over the annotation to reveal more information about how you are connected to Joe.
Social Search is powered by your social connections, a group of people including some of your Gmail contacts, public friends on sites like Twitter, and public friends of these friends. You can influence who is part of your social connections.This introduces an element of ‘human judgement’ suggesting that each web page has been viewed and endorsed by one or more people, and they have concluded it is relevant and worthy of being shared with others using human techniques that go beyond a search bot’s ability to analyze a web page and decide if the content is relevant to you or not.
The social search results that you see are personalized just for you. Other people will not see the exact same results that you see because they will be shown content from their own social connections.Web pages are considered to be relevant from the reader’s perspective, rather than the author who desires their content to be viewed, or the web master as they create links. You also get more current results. Because a social search engine is constantly getting feedback it is potentially able to display results that are more current or in context with changing information.
In order for social search to work you need a Google account and you need to be signed in to your Google Account to see social search results. Google is relieing on users filling in all the searches, if you have few social connections because you or your contacts are not connected through many online social services your social search results may not show up in your Google search. It is also possible that your network of contacts may not publish very much web content that is relevant to the types of searches you do. You can overcome this barrier by joining Google Plus and putting lots of people in your circles.
The content you share and publish publicly online may appear in the search results of others. As a content creator online, you can add or remove links on your Google profile to make your public content more or less discoverable.
If you’re a content author and Author tags have been added to your content pages and linked to your Google Profile, then your photo and name may appear next to these pages when they appear in search results, along with a link to your Google Profile. In addition, content you listed as yours will be added to the +1 tab of your Google Profile. When you share new content or change existing content, it may take up to a day or so for Social Search to discover and reflect these updates.
