Google Tweaks Search to Include Social Signals

Recent hires by Google indicates the company is trying to include social signals (like links shared by friends) into its search results. Also, Google is bringing social search results up from the bottom of the page.

Google already had a product that turned up results at the bottom of the page for users who had connected their Google and Twitter accounts. Those results will now be scattered into the regular results, provided the user is logged-in and the social result is deemed relevant. Google will now give higher ranking to URLs that are shared as links by friends on public sites like Twitter. Google will also allow users to link social services to their Google account by making that linkage not display on their public Google profiles.

Though some inside Google have indicated that social recommendation are important in search, others have indicated that social is a "just one...tiny signal."

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