socialmedian: How Google’s new social search can suck in your Facebook friends

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How Google’s new social search can suck in your Facebook friends

Source: VentureBeat

Oct 26, 2009

Summary

Google’s foray into the world of social search is now live.

As we wrote last week, Google social search pulls in results from your friends alongside conventional results. If you’re thinking about visiting Brazil, a traditional search might turn up hotels, tourism agencies and restaurants. But in social search, blog posts or tweets about the trip from friends might turn up at the bottom of the search results page. It pulls in contacts from Twitter, Friendfeed and Gmail.

Conspicuously absent from the list is your Facebook network.

But really, Google already has it (or at least the public pieces of it). Facebook’s public search listings randomly generate photos of eight random friends. Crawl it enough times and presto! You have a rough social graph. (Even academics from Cambridge University have done it.) Of course, it lacks the richness that Facebook’s social graph data can deliver, because Facebook knows whose profiles you look at frequently, whose posts you comment on and “like”, and whose photos you end up in.

Still, Google has some of that in Gmail if you’re a

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