Google Social Search and your neighborhood connections

Google introduced the idea of Social Search back in October 2009, but I just recently started seeing instances of it in the wild.  I think this is a social version of backrub and only the beginning.

The way it is shown is at the bottom of search results:

Results from people in your social circle for google social search – BETA – My social circle – My social content

SERPs then show pictures of your connections, how you are connected to them, and hopefully relevant content they have written or linked to.

Digging in further you can start to see how Google sees you and your social graph, and going further to the Google Social Circle area (link should work for you) shows you a “neighborhood” of social connections.

It says the following;

This is the network of connections Google uses to identify relevant social search results. It is based on a combination of the following:

• Direct connections from your Google chat buddies and contacts (28)
• Direct connections from links listed on your Google profile (215) such as Twitter and FriendFeed
• Secondary connections (1667) that are publicly associated with your direct connections

This is the network of connections Google uses to identify relevant social search results. It is based on a combination of the following:
Direct connections from your Google chat buddies and contacts (28)Direct connections from links listed on your Google profile (215) such as Twitter and FriendFeedSecondary connections (1667) that are publicly associated with your direct connections

and looks something like this:

This is interesting for a few reasons.  The first is that it exposes the connections Google believes you have.  The second is that it shows the content it thinks those connections contribute to.  The sources are listed clearly as Twitter, Friendfeed, Chat, and Contacts.  This relationship matching is quite impressive and shows that Google Social search is actually matching my contacts with their content, then searching and matching those results back into my search streams.

Earlier this week I got a chance to hear Clay Shirky speak about a concept that is quite obvious to many looking at the micro social media space, but in a new way.   His thesis was around the fact that the most important person in the universe is YOU and the people with close ties are close to the center of the universe (friends) but not quite at the center.

I cannot express his thoughts in the same eloquent way, but my general takeaway was as follows.  Your general social circle, or neighborhood is only so big.  Your secondary neighborhood is some order of magnitude larger.  Your tertiary neighborhood is probably an order of magnitude larger than the 2nd.  This means that by association, you may have a million or so connections that you are indirectly connected with.  These connections are not real in the “friend” sense, but certainly are real in the “I am influenced by what they are thinkingreadingdoing sense” as there is a high probability of correlation between activities.  Some of this is serendipity, but some of it is because of similar social connections and friendships.  He is interested in movie category X, and therefore I have some probability to be interested in the same category X.

How does this translate to being important for Google Social Search?

By looking at the people I interact with Google is building a beachhead on knowing and understanding my neighborhoods.  They know the first tier neighborhood by chat conversations, Twitter messaging, and links.  They know the second tier neighborhood from those friends connections and crawling the content they produce mapping its importance back to me.  Finally, they grasp the third tier (which is perhaps the largest) by connecting tiers 1 + 2, and looking to their outlying friends connections and content.

I believe that Google believes in the thesis that you are located at the center of the universe, and uses these galaxies of connections (or neighborhoods as Clay and sociologists call them) to help you and provide value in search results.

This same information could then be leveraged to provide a better taste menu of content without having to sort through filters, categories, and keywords you are interested in following.  The power of knowing what my friends are reading and gauging my interest is a problem that needs solving.  The constant banter about “too much information” and “information overload” can be quelled by a smarter, yet automatic, filter for content that could be helpful or interesting to you.

The inputs are very clear signal using time, quantity, content, and proximity to influence the taste menu.

If I havn’t spoken to someone in awhile, emailed with them, @replied them, then the connection fades.  On the contrary, if I have chatted with them, emailed, clicked through to their content, and interacted with them that is an indicator that the connection is stronger.  This example does not take sentiment into account, but I think that is fine.  Even if you have constant disagreement with someone – interactions show interest in a category therefore can be signal for the social search content that gets shown back to you.

The other interesting connection, and the reason why I use the phrase galaxies instead of neighborhoods, is the web content Google now knows I am associated with.  In an area called Social Content, Google identifies websites that I am affiliated with.  It is really a natural language association of “back rub” Googles original search thesis of links, but it works.  For example it takes sites I link out to and makes them “connections” simply implying that there is a correlation between the site websites.  Although it misses some of the sites I am a part of, it certainly captures the majority – all using the signal of reciprocal linking and content to make the judgement call.

I think that Social Search is in its nascent stages, and we will continue to see neighborhoods and galaxies of connections uses to create better taste menus.  I think consumer reaction to such a display of connections and friend mapping will be met with initial disdain and privacy concerns, but then people will realize that Google is just providing an organized view of your publicly available interactions.