Googles New Social Circle in Search Results
Posted on June 20th, 2010 | in Web | Be the First to Comment
Google has added a new feature to it’s search results based on networks that you let Google know you’re a member of. It finds connections, looks for people you know who have content available in Google searches and presents the information to you in a nice way.
So I’m not sure when this happened, but I just noticed it.
While doing an image search for iPhone Wallpapers I noticed one of my favorite digital artists’, James White‘s images on the page. At first I thought that was really bizarre that google would just happen to show one of my favorite artists stuff in the results. Then I noticed that they added something new. I wasn’t sure how exactly they figured out any kind of connection with James White but upon clicking “My Social Circle” I discovered the quite lengthy answer.
It appears google uses 3 ways to created connections.
- gChat and Gmail contacts
- Contacts found through your extended network via google profile. Meaning, I have my facebook and twitter linked to my Google Profile among other sites. It checks for matches through whatever sites i seemingly have listed on my Google Profile and gets relevant content.
- Other people. Information pulled from other peoples links. So if I pop up in your information and have some pictures on my flickr or blog you might be looking for, there they are.
Quickly scrolling through, it would appear about 80% of my connections are established through my Twitter account while the other 20% is split up between Flickr and my email contacts.
This is pretty interesting and provides for some cool opportunities. If my friend posts a picture I thought was funny and I wanted to find it again, this should make that process MUCH easier. With everybody branching out more and more in terms of how many services their a part of, remembering if my friend posted that lolcat on Facebook, in an email or on Twitter might be unnecessary now. as long as Google knows how many connections I have with that person, it should be able to find the images.
My Social Content.
The other aspect of the new feature is seeing what content you’re providing. A quick look at the links you’ve listed on your google profile and you get a broad picture of where content is coming from. Maybe you want to add some more, maybe you need to take some off. I’ll be adding my Tumblr accounts for sure.
All cool new features that i think are very welcome to most. Should make some aspects of searching a lot easier. And that’s why we use Google in the first place.
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