Google’s Social Search is doing the walk, all the rest are just doing the talk. As soon as I activated the Social Search experiment, my next search yielded a social result. No setting up, showing how I am connected to that result (including friends of friends), showing as part of the standard web results…
Contrast this with Microsoft’s poor attempt at “social search” by indexing tweets and status messages and showing them regardless of the actual searcher (example search, you’ve got to be on “United States” locale on bing to see it).
Then also contrast it with Facebook’s announcement back in August of its implementation of searching within friends’ posts – a less grandiose announcement that yet delivered far more social experience than Bing’s. Nevertheless, it’s a very limited experience and far from being a true information source for any serious search need.
So how does Google overcome the main obstacle – collecting your connections?
Google relies on its own sources and on open sources it can obtain by crawling the social graph. That is the true reason why Facebook is not part of Google’s graph (no XFN/FOAF marking on Facebook’s public pages). Google may be counting on Facebook’s inevitable opening up, and with Gmail’s rising popularity it becomes a reasonable alternative even for Facebook users like me.
Sadly, all this great news gave zero credit to Delver, where it all happened first…
The Alter Egozi 