Tuesday saw Google rolling out a new feature that will allow account holders to see content privately shared to them by their social contacts. Meant to strengthen its social search prowess, the feature tightly integrates between Google+, Picasa and its search engine.
With the integration, Google aims to further improve the ease with which its users can find not just the information they need on public Web pages, but also be notified of what content they are getting privately over its social network and media sharing circuits online. It would be great to see what you and your friends have shared with other social sites under Google’s wing such as Blogger and YouTube, or even with competing social network sites like Facebook and Twitter as well. But for now, you have the integration among the three.
Google’s reference to the new feature as “Search, plus Your World” functionality may be an over-promise. But the recent move is just the start with Google’s enablement to search privately shared content in the social media sites. “There’s a lot of opportunities for us to expand this,” said Google’s Ben Smith during an interview.
Still, whether Google can strike a deal with Facebook remains a dark horse. Moreover, Google let pass a two-year agreement opportunity allowing access to Twitter’s real time tweets. Smith didn’t comment on potential future agreements with Facebook or Twitter, but it’s quite clear that the leading search engine will not really be offering the “world” of social connections anytime soon.
Google+ was launched in 2009, after social networking had become not just immensely popular, but also a rich source of relevant content worth covering in Google’s search results as a social search. Until Monday, Google’s social search mined content shared over its social circuit or tagged using the Google +1 button. It also showed links from social contacts in Digg, Twitter and Flickr just by logging in to their Google accounts with access to non-Google media sites.
By Tuesday, Google users can now see Google+ posts and Picasa images they have privately posted or shared to them by other account holders in a Google search result and labeled as “personal results” on the result page. Google will also include links to Google+ profiles of users Google determines might interest you in a featured called “Profiles in Search.”
