Google's "Social Search" feature goes live

The new feature dubbed "Social Search" currently lies under the experimental features in Google Labs and uses a user's social networks for search results.

Google Search compliments Google Labs
Google vice president Marissa Mayer unveiled details of the new experimental search tool at last week's Web 2.0 Summit.

On Monday, the Mountain View, California-based search mammoth announced that it is complimenting Google Labs with Google Search, an experimental search feature that will essentially focus on the social networks of a user for increasingly relevant search results.

Features: Social Search
The main aim of the new experiment Google Social Search is to 'find more relevant public content' from the broader social circle of a user, which not only includes a user's contacts in Gmail and Google Talk, but also the friends or followers in all the services that fundamentally form the base of Social Search, Google said in a blog post.

The new search tool will basically pull results from Google's Gmail and Reader services, along with social networks like Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

On privacy issue raised by the new Social Search feature, Google has stressed that private information will not be made public via Social Search.

"You can find it without Social Search if you really want to. What we've done is surface that content together in one single place to make your results more relevant," Google said.

How to activate Social Search tool?
To link the new Social Search feature to their Google Account, users need to create a Google Profile and add links to the social networking sites that they want Google to search. After that they would have to activate Social Search through the Google Experimental Labs route.

On its Web search page Google has described Google Social Search as an experimental feature that helps users find relevant public web content from people in their social circle, when they're signed in to their Google Account. For example, when users search for [restaurants], restaurant reviews by their friends and other contacts will appear more prominently in search results.

Google deals with Twitter
Launch of latest search feature comes mere days after Microsoft and Google announced deals with Twitter to incorporate Twitter postings into Bing and Google.com, respectively.

Last week, software mammoth Microsoft rolled out Bing Twitter search beta service to add live public updates from the site to its Bing search engine, while search engine giant Google had announced its deal with Twitter that enables it to include Twitter updates to its Search in coming few months.