Less than a week after the two of the giants of the search world finally got their hands on Twitter feeds, Google has added another dimension to its organic search results – social search.
Google Social Search was switched on today and already has the tech world buzzing a fair bit.
The first thing to stress is that it is not live search – it is trusted search. But this is not search from who Google thinks are trusted sources, but sources who you the user would probably think are trusted sources – in other words: friends, colleagues and contacts.
Google does this by adding a user’s Gmail contacts into the system and then cross-matching any relevant content they have produced and placing into search results.
Other Google-related data streaming in includes providers of trusted RSS feeds via Google Reader, Google chat contacts, Flickr connections, people being followed on Twitter – the list goes on.
What Google has created is what it calls a Social Circle – a circle of friends or trusted sources, you might say.
So how does it work and what does it mean for travel?
After creating a profile on Google and selecting the Social Search option in Google Labs, let’s pretend we’re looking for information about Mallorca hotels.
The results from Social Search can be displayed in their entirety or within existing search results.
Here, results feature relevant content to the search for Mallorca hotels but only from people within the Social Circle, such as Darren Cronian of Travel Rants or Guido of the Happy Hotelier blog.
Despite the relative hassle of selecting the Labs tool and filling in the profile, once the system is streaming through the results are actually very interesting.
And, lo and behold, relevant and – dare we say it – trustworthy because they have come from people in the social circle.
The implications, once again, are quite extraordinary for the travel sector.
Google has within the space of a week added two new dimensions to search, both of which will have a major impact on the way travel firms use search and brand awareness.
This latest dimension puts the concept of reviews into a new context. And clearly puts the pressure back onto existing content providers to ensure such content it is relevant or unique enough for the user.
There will, of course, be question marks over whether users can be bothered to turn on the functionality. However, once created it pretty much runs itself, so over time it will probably become simply part of the furniture of search results and not look so out of place (remember how awkward maps at the top of search first looked?).
An intriguing angle to this latest development is what will happen to individual reviews that currently stream into search results from the likes of TripAdvisor et al?
If users start to rely solely on those providing reviews within their Social Circle, will Google then decree that the old organic results are not as valuable and they therefore become irrelevant?
The overall effect of such shifts in behaviour when it comes to search and trust will mean that it will be more important than ever that consumers become the champions for travel products and services.
Once again, travel firms will simply not be able to operate in a vacuum and expect customers to return year after year – they will have perform and interact better with customers.
The power of search has just increased exponentially once again with the addition of this dimension.
- First dimension – organic and paid-for search results
- Second dimension – real time search results (Twitter et al)
- Third dimension – social (circle) search
Here is the official demo video from Google for Social Search:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqWJxgp-_mU
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Another good video is Matt Cutts explanation of Google Social Search – here is the link: http://bit.ly/4rFAeZ
I agree – this adds an important new dimension in the quest for relevant search results.
The other interesting question is if members of social circles will now suddenly be driven to provide keyword-rich reviews (as they currently do with blog posts) to gain higher Social Search rankings – a whole new SEO discipline may be born.
Wondering if I should start telling my 11-year old daughter that her science essay on Volcanoes had good content and was grammatically correct, but it needed to include a broader and richer selection of keywords…?
It’s implemented quite well for an experiment as it’s separated out from the main results. What I would like to know is how they are going to integrate real-time and social results into my main results. I don’t really want three separate queries output on the same results page, but equally I don’t want my results biasing by the people I follow or real-time when I might actually just want relavancy.
It’s going to be a trial and error approach I’d imagine to slowly integrate these new features into the results set, making use of their multi-variate testing tech.
Or maybe they’ll always be separate?
That’s definitely a big step for search.
I’ve always thought that social selection is particularly relevant for reviews. I always filter TripAdvisor reviews by inferring the type of person writing the review since one persons holiday heaven is holiday hell. Adding some kind of social profiling to review weighting is one of the things I’ve been thinking about for a long time. Ok, that’s not quite the same thing as Google are doing here, but good to see that things are moving in that direction.
Will also be interesting to see what kind of moves this triggers in the SEO industry..
This goes in the right direction but is still rather hard to use by the mainstream of users. As explained, who will first go to Labs – find that first! – then enable the functionality and also find the social search results there. All not too easy.
Also the results are keywords based. Hotels in Hawaii returns blogposts that mention those words but are not reviews of properties. As always with search the user has to wade through whatever the results are, relevant or not.
But again, a step in the right direction of integrating input from the social graph.