Google Social Search is an experimental feature that helps you find relevant public web content from people in your social circle, when you’re signed in to your Google Account. For example, search for [ restaurants ], and restaurant reviews by your friends and other contacts may appear more prominently in your results. Join the Social Search experiment at http://www.google.com/experimental
Social Search adds relevant content from your contacts to your results.
Watch a video overview
When you join the Social Search experiment, Google may bring up results from your friends and other contacts. These special results appear at the bottom of the search results page, in a section labeled “Results from people in your social circle.”
With Social Search, you’ll be able to more easily find relevant public content from your social circle, such as the following:
Websites, blogs, public profiles, and other content linked from your friends’ Google profiles.
Web content, such as status updates, tweets, and reviews, from social services that your friends have listed in their Google profiles.
Relevant articles from your Google Reader subscriptions.
You can also filter your search results to only see results from people in your social circle. Here’s how:
Click Show Options at the top of the search results page to open the Options panel.
Click Social to filter your results.
If you don’t want to see social search results, you can simply sign out of your Google Account, or opt out of the Social Search experiment at any time. To opt out, visit http://www.google.com/experimental and click the Leave button for the experiment.
Your social circle consists of contacts from Gmail and sites listed in your Google profile.
The following people make up your social circle:
People you’re connected to through social services that you’ve listed in your Google profile, such as Twitter and FriendFeed.
People in your Gmail (or Google Talk) chat list.
People in your Friends, Family, and Coworkers contact groups for Google.
If someone you don’t know shows up in your social search results, it’s likely that they’re connected to someone you do know. Social Search includes results from public connections of your immediate social circle, since there’s a high likelihood that you know them as well. For example, if you’re following someone on Twitter, and that person is following five other people, those five other people are also included in your social circle.
Watch a video explanation of social circles
Expand your social circle to improve your social search results.
You can improve your social search results by expanding your social circle and encouraging your friends to publish content online. Expand your social circle by doing the following:
Create a Google profile.
Add content to your Google profile, including links to other social services you use.
Subscribe to your friends’ content in Google Reader.
Add people you know to your network of contacts in the various social services you use.
Tell your friends to start tweeting, blogging, and share more web content.
Create a Google profile to improve how you appear in other people’s social search results.
Make yourself more discoverable in social search results by creating a Google profile. Then do the following:
Add links to content you want to share, such as your blog or YouTube channel.
Publish additional web content and make sure it’s all linked to your Google profile.
When you add new links to your profile, it may take a couple weeks (or longer) for your social search results to take new contacts and content into account.