The search giant first launched Social Search in 2009, a feature that integrates search results from your friends at the bottom of the search page. It utilizes social profiles connected to your Google Account to deliver things like photo or blog results that come from your friends.
Google’s making some prominent changes to Google Social Search though, and it is announcing three new partners that will appear prominently in social search results. We had a chance to speak with Product Management Director for Search Mike Cassidy about the changes.
The first major change is that Google Social Search results will no longer appear only at the bottom of the page, but will instead be “blended” throughout the page. This is done through an annotation system th at lets you know when a friend has shared a specific link or search result. If your friend writes a blog about how to create honey, that result will have an annotation that your friend has “shared this,” either via Google or through one of Google’s partners.
That leads into the second update to social search: a vast increase in its appearance in search. Any content shared by your friends on Quora, Flickr and Twitter can appear as a social annotation in search results. If a friend has tweeted a link to a Mashable article and your Google account is connected to Twitter, you’re likely to see an annotation saying that your friend “shared this on Twitter.”
The final update focuses on increasing the control users have over what is displayed in social search. Google has revamped its options page to give users the ability to both publicly and privately connect their social profiles to their Google accounts. It even suggests which...
