Google Social Search launches in Google Labs

Google has launched Google Social Search, its first serious foray into social networking search across multiple social networks.

Google Social Search allows users to search for results from among their social networks as part of a regular social search. In layman’s terms, once you sign up for the Google Social Search service (you have to opt in), your search results on Google include “Results from people in your social circle” at the bottom of each page.

To set up Google Social Search, go to Google Labs (link) and opt in. You also need to setup your Google Profile (link) if you haven’t yet, or if you have, you need to make sure you’ve included your various social networks on the page. One quick way of doing that is to add your FriendFeed account if you have on, then Google Profile automatically detects sites you have linked to your FriendFeed account.

If you don’t have a FriendFeed account, you have to add each site separately using the URL and name of the service, for example for Twitter add http://www.twitter.com/yourname and then add Twitter in the second box. The results in Google Social Search are based on the social networks you add to your Google Profile, so the more you add, the more extensive the results.

Like other subsets of Google Search, the results from Google Social Search can be expanded from their place on the Google search results to their own extensive search page. That page also shows the names of people in your networks that have written about the subject if you want to jump directly to them.

First impressions: I’m not sure. On one hand we’ve all survived perfectly well so far without social search, so although the idea is perhaps buzz worthy, I’m not sure it’s about to change the world either. But on that note, it might…there’s something about Google Social Search that screams this is the future.

The Google Social Search demo video as follows via The Official Google Blog: