Google getting ‘social’ with search engine marketing

Search engine marketing received a boost as it was debated today in the Click Through publication that Google’s Social Search provides online marketers with brand new enhancements for promoting their company.

The recently released Social Search feature will include content from users’ social networking contacts in search results. The feature was initially a Google Labs experiment but has graduated to a default feature on Google’s search homepage.

Such a feature is reported by Click Through to generate a breakthrough for internet marketers as it distributes relevant content from an organisation’s blogs, Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn profiles. The social search feature can also be used for Google Images, therefore, anyone submitting a query will be able to see results from photo sharing sites.

Users will additionally be able to see their network of contacts and how they are connected through a new feature dubbed ’my social circle’. Another feature of Social Search is ‘my social content’ and allows the user to look at a list of their public pages that may appear in other users search engine results.  

Nevertheless, not all agree that the feature is as useful as it is publicised. A blog post on pcworld.com argues that only a relatively small amount of information from Facebook profiles can be publicly published on the internet due to data protection laws and Facebook’s own privacy settings which allow its members to choose their own security options. Even Facebook’s ‘everyone’ option is only open to those signed into Facebook, not in fact the whole web as its name suggests.

This issue, is argued to be especially serious for Social Search - which relies heavily on returning relevant links to content from users’ social networks. As such, Social Search will miss out on the content and connections of Facebook’s 350 million users.

Technical lead for search at Google, Maureen Heymans, stated of the issue: ”Social Search includes public [social network] connections. Since Facebook’s connections aren’t public, we can’t at this time include them”.

Heymans added that: ”Its really important for us [Google] to try and bring you all the content you have access to from your social network friends.”

Currently, the Social Search feature will produce relevant results for those users who are signed into their Google account when they make searches. The feature will include contacts and content people have on Google services such as Gmail and Blogger and additionally, external social networking sites such as Twitter and FriendFeed (ironically owned by Facebook) who are amicable to public sharing of information.  

However, Facebook does have two public features – those of groups and promotional pages. Administrators of this pages are able to make content public on the web and thus open to features like Social Search. As such, groups and promo pages are designed for businesses or public icons/figures to establish an official aura where they can converse with fans or clients.