Google Social Search was launched last year as part of Google Labs, the product has been in testing and is due to be launched in the next few days, so what exactly does it do?

Google Social Search is an innovative concept which allows users to search their own personal social networks, blog posts and other social content for specific information. The possibilities are endless you could look within your own social network to find out firstly who is an expert on a specific topic and secondly who is talking about or has similar interests or opinions. Really this is just the very beginning; the possibilities for research are endless allowing users to network there direct contacts based on keyword search queries.

To get the full benefit of Google Social Search you will need a Google account and you’ll have to be signed in. Within your Google account you’ll need to configure your profile to include all of your social networks etc. Google have also added the service to Google Image search so you can find images based on a keyword search exclusively from your social circle.

“While we’ve been enjoying Social Search (and having babies), we’ve been hard at work on new features. For example, we’ve added social to Google Images. Now when you’re doing a search on Images, you may start seeing pictures from people in your social circle. These are pictures that your friends and other contacts have published publicly to the web on photo-sharing sites like Picasa Web Albums and Flickr. Just like the other social results, social image results appear under a special heading called “Results from your social circle” Google Blog.

We’ll update the post to let you know when the service has gone live but in the mean time, here’s a great video, by Google, which gives an overview of what lies ahead.

Article by Creative SEO