You can always expect great things out of a Web 2.0 Summit, and it looks as if this one was the mother of all. We have already covered in details the exclusive deals between search engines Google and Bing to index real time results from Twitter and Facebook to display on their platform. Google will only be indexing Twitter though.
But one more announcement which seems to be dying down because of the noise is the arrival of a new Google Labs product: Social Search.
Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of Search announced this during her talk in the summit. The product aims at importing news and feeds from your various social profiles into one place. It will allow you to search for queries from people in your social network. And obviously, this works using the still not very popular Google Profiles service.
If you fill it out with the social networks you have a presence on, Google will scan your network and give you results from those people. It will also be able to show rich media like news, images and videos. The results will be displayed at the bottom of the search results. So I guess this depends on your online connections, the more you are connected, the more results you will see. (You would also need to be signed in to Google)
The product will be launched in Google Labs in the next two weeks. Also, one downside which I can see from here is the fact that such a result would only work for networks that have an open search API, which rules out Facebook. The experiment would be opt-in and you would be asked before your Google Profile is indexed.
With Twitter also being included in Google results now (also BING), the internet has taken one more step towards becoming truly social, a huge mesh of interconnected websites, sharing and harnessing the data flowing around in data cables.
0 comments for this post