Google had previously integrated your friends’ Twitter links and shared content, but only at the bottom of your search results. Now it’s giving higher play and more explanation to your social circle in the latest Social Search update.
That’s a pretty big move, and it might be a precursor, or the entirety, of the social networking project that Google’s been hinting at and moving toward. Either way, it means that now your friends’ and contacts’ blog posts, tweets and other social moves play prominently into what you see after searching Google — at least while you’re signed in.
Google says that you can control the friends and networks you see results from in a new Connected Accounts section of your Google Accounts settings. Most helpful (whenever it shows up in our settings) is the ability to connect accounts privately, instead of the default public connections made in your Google Profile, so you can see the social results from a Twitter account, but not tell the world that it’s your Twitter username.
What do you think of Google’s social integration? Do you trust your friends, on the whole, to deliver relevant links, or should these worlds stay separate?
An update to Google Social Search [Official Google Blog]
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