The article (http://blogs.computerworld.com/14985/google_social_search_searches_your_social_circle) describes Google's Social Search feature that allows you to include content from friends into your Google search results. Google's Social Search uses your own lists of contacts from various services to build up a network, and then includes content specifically from the people you know. As an active user of Google Search this article caught my attention. I have mixed feeling about Google’s Social Search. Social Search seems interesting enough to tryout. However, I’m not sure I want to weed through a lot of information from friends and family in my Google search results.
Google Social Search was “an experimental feature that helps you find relevant public web content from people in your social circle, you must be logged into your Google account to make this work. Google has a site that gives more information regarding the opt in and the set up at: www.google.com/experimental/. This experiment gives you the option to opt into or out of the experiment when logged in. If you choose to opt in, the Google search results will include your friends and contacts. If your Google account profiles lists the social circles that you have joined, the search will be able to located your Gmail contacts, and people you are connected to through social services, such as Twitter and Friend Feed. An additional option is to filter the search results to only view results from people in your social circle. One caveat as mentioned in the site,” If someone you don't know shows up in your social search results, it's likely that they're connected to someone you do know. Social Search includes results from public connections of your immediate social circle, since there's a high likelihood that you know them as well.”While you may not always want to look at search results based on you social circles results, for those who do, this may be a useful feature. One way to look at it, which may be the only way I would find it useful, is instead of the social circles, it can be used as an educational benefit to identify classmates in the same classes you are taking or classmates in future classes you are scheduled to take. Although this may be a great option, again for some, I do worry about security, if strict features for security are not built in, the risk may be greater than the benefit
What are your thoughts on Google’s Social Search feature? Do you think this a useful feature? Would you use this feature?
