Google Updates Social Search, Your Friends Opinions May Now Affect Your Search Results

Google announced today an update to their Google Social Search feature that will more fully integrate the social search results into normal search results. Now when you view a search results page, you might also see little annotations under the results that have either been shared or liked by your friends. In fact, your friends' sharing and linking activities may actually affect your search results.

Google's Social Search was launched back in 2009, but the social search results were placed way down at the bottom of the page and mainly showed results that people created and linked through their Google profiles. But now they are fully incorporating results from social sites such as Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube.

And more interesting is that if someone you're connected to has publicly shared a link, then that link may show up higher in your results and an annotation of that person will show up right below the result. The company says that, "With these changes, we want to help you find the most relevant information possible, personalized to your interests and the people you care about."

Google's Social Search only works when you are logged into your Google Account. And this new update will start rolling out today in English only. You should start seeing the results within this coming week.

For a more in-depth explanation, watch Google's Social Search video:

[Via Google Blog]