Google’s New Social Search Experiment; still waiting?
I have been following the buzz about the possibility and then probability of Google unveiling its new social search function with interest, so it made sense that I was going to sign up for it and take a peek. My curiosity was mightily piqued, but I also felt a measure of satisfaction. I knew that eventually those Google Profiles that I so carefully have been building for all our clients would come into handy. It only made sense to me, even a year or more ago, that if Google offered you a chance to build something, like a profile, and you could add links to other places that “you” existed online, then Goggle would eventually do something with that information.
I decided to sign in as my own true self as my litmus test for any new service, site or function, was to see how it reacted to the online adoption community. After over ten years of being entrenched in this community, I know who the key players are. I know who is an early adopter, no pun intended, of technology and internet trends. I know, that as a community on the whole, we really have effortlessly moved on as social media grew into what it is today. So I signed in as FauxClaud, joined the Google Social Search Experiment, and put in a search that I have seen enough to know how it was different; I searched for “adoptee rights”.
I Saw No Sign of Social Search Results
I looked, but it looked exactly and completely the same. I went back to the Google explanation page and read it again, but still could not see what they meant. Google clearly says:
“Sign in to Google and do a search. If there’s relevant web content written by people in your social circle, it will automatically show up at the bottom of your search results under a section called “Results from people in your social circle.”
So, I kept on going to the bottom and kept on seeing nothing. I even called Eta over to read the same lines and see what I did not so I was positive that I was not on crack. (I don’t smoke crack, but I like that expression.)
She didn’t see it either, so I was about three seconds away from declaring Google Social Search as officially stupid, when I noticed that the left sidebar **looked a bit different to me. Aha, here was not quite what they described, but indeed, it was social search results.
