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Google Social Search invites your friends' activity into your results

Google has updated its Social Search filters making it easier to see what your friends have said about the topics you're searching for.

Andrew Lanxon Editor At Large, Lead Photographer, Europe
Andrew is CNET's go-to guy for product coverage and lead photographer for Europe. When not testing the latest phones, he can normally be found with his camera in hand, behind his drums or eating his stash of home-cooked food. Sometimes all at once.
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Andrew Lanxon
2 min read

You can now filter your Google results according to what your friends have been sharing or discussing over the Intertubes, following an update to the Web behemoth's Social Search feature.

The almighty Google -- you may have heard of it -- has brought three main upgrades to Social Search. Firstly, rather than the results from all your lovely little friends appearing in a separate section at the bottom of the page, they will now be integrated throughout your searches, being ranked anywhere on the page.

Google has also made it so that links appearing in the search results that your friends have shared over Twitter will appear higher in your search with an annotation saying who tweeted it.

The G dog has also enabled the ability to link your accounts privately through your Google account rather than publicly on your profile, meaning you can now hide your social network identity if you so choose (or if you are Batman).

Social search was originally launched in 2009 and works by integrating your accounts from many sources (such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and other publicly available sites) to show you what your friends have said about the topics you searched for -- on the assumption that you will place more importance on results from people you know and trust.

If you search for 'Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1', for example, it will bring up our beautiful, masterfully crafted (and modest) coverage, but will also intertwine this with results from your social circle -- showing for example, your mate's tweet about how the Galaxy Tab makes him vomit with happiness. Similarly, if you do an image search, it will bring up related images your friends have uploaded to sites such as Flickr or Picasa.

Assuming you have at least one friend, it's a neat idea that allows you to see what's popular in your social circles. You don't need to provide passwords to any of these sites, simply enter the URL and the big G will do the rest.

The updates will be made as of now, so expect to see them within the next week.

Here's Google's video discussing Social Search. It's all cartoony, which is nice.