So, to the great excitement of many some people, Google put on a show yesterday and released into the wild its new real time completion search solution, Google Instant. And yes, it’s very nice. And yes, in case you were wondering, this is the search nerd equivalent of people freaking out when Steve Jobs stands up and tells everyone he’s bought a new polo neck, or whatever it is he does.

Anyway, I’m sure the search engine marketing implications of this will be picked over at great length (my initial instinct is that it’s going to push more emphasis onto natural search over PPC as people’s click through habits will change, but that’s pure speculation), but I wanted to write about something else that Google have recently added that’s flying under the radar a bit.

If you go to Google – you have to be logged in to your Google account to do this, by the way – and conduct a search normally, then scroll down to the bottom of the page, then there might well be some search returns under the header ‘returns from people in your social circle for (x) – BETA’. As the title suggests, these are returns from people that you’re linked to through your Google account – that is, people you follow on Buzz, on GChat, blogs you follow through your RSS feed and crucially, people that they follow and are linked with too. So, for example, when I searched for Vertical Leap, the search returns for this part included the blogs of some of my co-workers, and some of the blogs they were following.

–update: this doesn’t seem to have been rolled out for everyone–

Very interesting indeed.

If you’ve ever tried to search for anything in Facebook, too, there seems to be a similar reference based search return selection.

Does this mean that Google are going to entirely abandon search returns as we know them? It seems very unlikely. However, this recent addition, along with the introduction of reviews into local search returns, seems to indicate a definite corporate philosophy that Google is able to achieve their stated goal of bringing the most relevant content to their users by looking at their neighbourhoods – the implication being, if we’re friends, and you like something, in all likelihood, I will too. Perhaps there’s an unstated desire for Google to become the oil that greases the social reference process – a little like a bar giving out free shots, except without the troubling socio-economic problems.

So, given that this seems to be the way things are going, what does this mean? Just from a user point of view, it’ll be interesting to see how people react; one of the implications of this is that Google is taking what you’ve been reading / writing about and putting it in front of people that you may only know tangentially – it’s not a social network to whom people have consciously granted permission to use their data, so just how much of a fanfare they make of this will be interesting. If I were Ian Google, I might be inclined to launch another, flashier (but ultimately less remarkable) product at the same time, whilst giving people a chance to get used to these new returns without stopping to consider the greater consequences.

But that’s just what I’d do.

Ok, ok. This is a search marketing blog, and that might be the longest introduction I’ve written, ever.  What are the consequences for websites trying to increase their traffic? As I wrote in my blog some time back about review language in local search returns, I can see nothing but upside for those that are prepared to work at this and use it to their advantage. For starters, it’s essentially a back door to the first page of the search returns; at the moment it’s at the bottom of the page, but tell me you don’t think that it’ll receive more prominence as people use it more?

How do you go about using this to your advantage?  It might help to start thinking along the same lines as Google, here. If you assume, for a minute, that your customer base is made of individuals with a shared set of interests and priorities – not least, an interest, or use for your product – then you might assume that a decent number of them are connected to each other. So, if Ms X uses your product, and then writes about it her blog, or mentions it on her Buzz, or subscribes to your blog, then there you go – not just, as before, some nice free marketing, but also a short cut to the first page of search returns of Mr Y and Dr Z, who are acquaintances of Ms X, somewhere along the line.

So, what can you do?  Firstly, wow – your blog becomes important now. If you can get people to subscribe through Google Reader, another path to success. It’s more than just a great source of content, keywords and a site architecture tool.

I’m just scratching the surface here, but again, it becomes important to cultivate relationships with customers – I wrote about the importance of customer experience yesterday, and this ties in with that, too. You’re probably collecting customers’ email addresses when they register, contact you, and so forth – it’s pretty easy to sort these in a spreadsheet to identify the Google accounts among them, and from there, you can quickly work out who has a blog, who is active in your market place, who might be amenable to the formation of a mutually beneficial relationship. Remember, everyone is an opinion leader to their social circle.

So, conclusion – social search marketing is going to become increasingly important as Google pays more attention to it. Don’t find yourself left behind.