Introducing Google Social Search

This is going to be a fantastic tool for searching about incredibly mundane stuff I don't really care about primarily from people I friended only because I felt awkward declining their request. The possibilities are endless.

It will be interesting to see how this turns out. It seems to me that it would just make search results even worse in quality.

Clearly if it assigns extra weight to stuff written by your friends and contacts then it will be harder to find stuff written by experts and legitimate trustworthy sources. Not that friends can't be experts of legitimate and trustworthy, but personally I'd rather see results from known professionals rather than seeing results from someone who I just happened to "friend".

Most social network friendships are completely meaningless exchanges so using those connections in search results is also going to meaningless.

But I may be wrong. Does anyone else have a differing opinion?

This is one of the best things that can be done with Social Data.

I remember the day Google got access to Twitter data. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=896297

After Sergey and Larry step down, we're all screwed. Google's seemingly philanthropic offering of free goodies will be exploited by the next-gen CEO's. They have us by the balls, in terms of information. What the hell do we do now?

And no, moving to Canada is not an option.

Google's going after facebook? Guess it's also them trying to outflank Bing with their announcement of immediate implementation of returning Twitter searches... interesting move