First of all, let’s set the scene:

• Over the past few years, the number of active users on social networking sites has risen dramatically.
• We’re also more likely to value a friend’s opinion over the opinion of “RandomBlogger29″ for example.

To take advantage of these two points and improve the relevance of search results for users, the boffins at Google HQ launched Social Search back in 2009. However, there have been some recent developments which could potentially revolutionise the way that search and social media work together.

What is social search?

Google Social Search pulls tweets and other posts or updates from your favourite social networks into Google’s natural search results. For example; you want to go out for a nice in meal in Bath and naturally, the first thing you do is search for ‘restaurants in Bath’ on Google. You notice that below one of the results is an annotation marked “@danmorganuk shared this on Twitter”. It’s then possible to click-through to the tweet and see whether I thought the restaurant “served tasty food at a reasonable price” or I “had to queue for 45mins to get a table”. The idea is that you’ll find this recommendation from someone you know to be a lot more useful than a regular search result.

How have Google changed Social Search?

Previously, Social Search annotations would have been listed together at the bottom of the page. This latest update means that they are now shown just below each appropriate result, wherever it appears on the page. If you’re signed up to Twitter, Flickr and/or Quora, a new development allows you to see Social Search annotations when your friends have shared content via these social networks. The third new development means that you can choose whether you want to connect your accounts publicly using your Google profile or privately in your Google account; this offers users more control.

What it means for social media and SEO

Search engines are increasingly realising the importance of social media in search; this latest news goes to show how important it is for brands to have a good presence within social media, as this should mean a better presence in natural search results. One thing that hasn’t changed is that the key to success in social media and search is creating engaging, unique content. A notable omission from Google Social Search is that of Facebook ‘likes’ which are used in Bing’s version of social search. What impact will these changes to social search have? Will social search on Bing prove to be more powerful than Google’s offering? We’ll have to wait and see!