Google Social Search has been around since 2009, but now the search engine can search terms as well as search to see if any friends or colleagues have tweeted or posted about the topic.
"Social search results will now be mixed throughout your results based on their relevance," Mike Cassidy and Matthew Kulick wrote on the Official Google Blog. "This means you’ll start seeing more from people like co-workers and friends, with annotations below the results they’ve shared or created."
That means users can see similar questions posted on Quora, photos on Flickr or tweets related to the search. Google has also added notes that are only visible to a viewer when he or she has signed into her Google account. Lastly, the search engine will allow users to connect to other social networking accounts privately in a Google account to keep other user names on the down-low -- previously they were made public.
However, don't expect to see results from Facebook, including likes, "This is just the beginning, and we’re going to be doing much more to improve the comprehensiveness of Google Social Search," Cassidy told Search Engine Land.
So, is Google working hard to come up with a social network to rival Facebook, or will it use its power as a search engine to keep it from growing or succeeding as quickly? For now, it's unclear what Google's intentions are, but the new additions to Google's Social Search show the company is clearly keeping social networking alive.
.
