I have been trying out Google Social Search and Bing Twitter search. Both were announced at the Web 2.0 Summit on October 21. Choosing such a pretigious event to announcing it I was quite excited about it. No need; Google Social Search is will probably join the other Google products that are fun to use but serve a need that does not exist and Twitter search on Bing is…. well, Twitter Search except on Bing.
Google Social Search in a nutshell it allows you to search your social media friends for information on your search term. Admittedly the idea of getting information from a trusted source seems very attractive but there are two limitations to this service. Firstly not all my social media friends are really trusted sources as I follow different people for different reasons. Secondly if searching for opinions on a particular subject I would like to see opinions from a wide source, perhaps finding more friends in the process. I do not like the idea of excluding sources when searching. The most successful Google products have always filled a obvious need and are by and large easy to use.
Bing Twitter search will be a more useful tool. It is still in beta so it is still a bit slow an incomplete but with Bing technology improving the search results such as getting rid of duplicates and using their algorithm to return the most relevant results it should prove to be a very valuable search source.
I can see where Google and Bing are going with social search as it brings into the search results the element of trust, and trust is going to be a critical element of search in the future.
