What is Social search? Why it is useful?

Social search is also called as a social search engine which is a web search method that considers the interactions or contributions of users and determines the relevance of search results. If you applied to web search, this user-based approach to relevance is in contrast to machine-based approaches or established algorithmic where by analyzing the link structure of the documents or the text of each document, relevance is determined.

Social search or social search engine takes many forms, ranging from simple shared bookmarks or tagging of content to more sophisticated approaches that which human intelligence with computer algorithms.

The search experience takes into account varying sources of metadata like collaborative discovery of web pages, social ranking, tags, commenting on bookmarks, images, news, videos, podcasts, knowledge sharing and other web pages.

Features of Google Social Search:

1.    It helps you find relevant public web content from people in your social circle, when you are signed in to your Google Account.

2.    It adds relevant content from your contacts to your results.

3.    Google may bring up results from your contacts when you join the Social Search experiment. These results appear in a section labeled “Results from people in your social circle” at the bottom of the search results page.

You will be able to easily find relevant public content from your social circle with Social Search like:

1.    Relevant articles from your Google Reader subscriptions.
2.    Websites, public profiles, blogs and other content linked from your friend’s Google profiles
3.    Web content like status updates, reviews and tweets from social services that your friends have listed in their Google profiles.

So, in this way you can be benefited from Social search engine.