Google may already be in the social networking market with its Brazil-centric Orkut service, however that has not stopped the search giant from adding new social features to its array of products.
A post at the (unofficial) Google Operating System blog recounts the history of Google Reader’s social evolution, up to but not including its latest update last week.
SearchWiki, though not a social search feature per se, allows users to share personal annotations of their search results, as does the more recently introduced Sidewiki. And, like Bing, Google has established a partnership with Twitter in order to surface “social” results.
But the feature announced yesterday, which Google is actually calling “Social Search“, is a much bigger step, even if it is tucked away as an experiment on Google Labs.
From the official blog post:
With Social Search, Google finds relevant public content from your friends and contacts and highlights it for you at the bottom of your search results. When I do a simple query for [new york], Google Social Search includes my friend’s blog on the results page under the heading “Results from people in your social circle for New York.” I can also filter my results to see only content from my social circle by clicking “Show options” on the results page and clicking “Social.
