There has been a lot of buzz this week on the web regarding Twitter inking deals with both Google and Bing regarding a new concept called “Social Search”. The idea behind social search is that when you search for information online, you care about more than just what Google deems as important. Not only should you able to search by what Google or Bing deems as authoritative but also by what your friends and colleagues deem as authoritative.
It seems that Bing was the first to release a product to the public capturing the concept of “social search” by offering the website BingTweets.com which offers a mashup of Bing search results alongside what people are saying on twitter. Then, this past week, Bing officially announced that it would be partnering with both Facebook and Twitter to provide search results followed by Google making a similar announcement quickly thereafter.
With both Google and Bing gunning to be the first at implementing social networks into the core of their search algorithms, we can expect to see major changes in the way sites rank when people search for them. Without a doubt this has the potential to be the biggest game changer in online marketing in over a decade.
To find out more about Google’s entry to the social search arena, search guru Matt Cutts explains below how Google’s new experimental social search feature works.
This will be huge. I wonder when google will actually make something with this that people will use.