• The Register (UK) et al., Tuesday, October 27, 2009 1:23 PM

Not to be outdone by the new "social" establishment, Google just unveiled its "Social Search" tool to an odd mixture of trepidation and golf claps. The Google Labs experiment "creepily helps users probe more 'relevant public content' from their 'broader social circle,'" is how The Register (UK) framed the announcement. "The company has already been improving search results to make them more personally tailored to an individual surfer's stalker needs."

That said, "Just about any social-networking-focused product that Google rolls out brings a group of naysayers pointing fingers and calling it creepy," writes the Los Angeles Times. "Let's turn it down a notch."

PR expert and blogger Steve Rubel, meanwhile, only had good things to say about Google's recent efforts to become more social. "Because I have lived in Gmail the last five years, there's loads of data in there that can make social networking even more powerful," he writes, adding, "Second, its agnostic ... Google doesn't care which social network you join."

Good or bad, notes Softpedia, "The search landscape is getting a lot more complicated lately and all the major players are moving beyond just the traditional search, adding new elements like real time and social search."

In an official blog post, Google says the tool "finds relevant public content from your friends and contacts and highlights it for you at the bottom of your search results."

The new tool allows users to see search results for a simple query, such as New York, that includes any friends that might have referenced the city in their blog. Social Search can also be filtered so that only results of content from a person's "social circle" are shown.

Notes Digital Daily: "There's a fine line to be tread here, between sharing information within a social network and protecting privacy."

To appease privacy advocates, Google pointed out that all the information it pools together via the tool was already "published publicly on the Web." Google has stitched a user's friends and contacts list into a public Google profile, which grabs info from the likes of Twitter. Anyone interested in using the tool needs to first sign up to a Google account -- if they don't have one already, that is.

On the heals of Microsoft announcing its Twitter and Facebook tie-ups, Google's VP of Search Marrisa Mayer said last week that Google already had an agreement with the micro-blogging service, and was about to launch "Social Search."

Read the whole story at The Register (UK) et al. »