SAN FRANCISCO--Google Vice President Marissa Mayer made a surprise announcement at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday: "Social Search," a new Google Labs experiment that will bring in search results from a member's social-network contact circle.
It'll be launching as an opt-in project in the next few weeks. Then, you'll need to have a Google account and set up a Google Profile to fill in information about the social networks that you use. Google first launched Profiles about a year ago.
"What we've done here is inserted, on the bottom of the page, content written by people in your social network," Mayer said, adding that Google hopes this will "really improve the overall relevance, comprehensiveness, and quality" of search results. A search for a local restaurant, for example, could bring up your friends' Yelp reviews for the same establishment. A search for travel destinations could bring up a post from a friend's blog.
This comes on the same day that Google announced that it had entered into an agreement with Twitter to bring real-time "tweets" to search results. That's another product that has yet to actually launch.
"The idea is for...these fast-rising queries, where there's a period of time (when there are) actually tweets about that topic, and the definitive news source hasn't been written yet," Mayer said of the Twitter partnership, declining to disclose its financial terms.
This post was updated at 4:25 p.m. PT.
Oops! Facebook posted this screenshot of a new feature to Twitter and then pulled it.
(Credit: Facebook)It looks as if Facebook was a little premature in using its Twitter account to announce "Prototypes," a Google Labs-like operation that lets members beta-test new features for the social network and offer feedback.
The tweet offering a screenshot of Prototypes was swiftly deleted--but props to The Next Web for snagging it before it was pulled.
So what are the "prototypes" in question? Facebook seems to be experimenting with desktop notifications, content discovery, and upgrades to its Events invitation service. Next to each test feature is a star-based rating system through which, presumably, users can offer their feedback.
Facebook plans to take the stage at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco early on Tuesday afternoon to make a developer-related announcement. It's pretty likely that this has something to do with it.
Just in time for the home stretch of the U.S. presidential showdown, some crafty engineers at Google have created a tool to compare quotations from candidates Barack Obama and John McCain. Called "In Quotes," the Google Labs project lets you search for a given term (say, "economy") and Google will bring up a quotation from each presidential candidate that mentions the term.
Hit the "spin" button to display different quotations, all of which have been pulled from recent Google News stories.
You can also compare quotations from U.K. prime minster Gordon Brown and rival David Cameron, Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper and rival Stéphane Dion, and Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh and opposition leader Lal Krishna Advani.
It's a cute pre-election tool, but it's certainly not perfect. A search for what the Canadian candidates said about "Bush" revealed a quotation from Dion about hunting that happened to contain the word "bush." And what's worse, I couldn't find anything from either Barack Obama or John McCain about "Batman." Their position on Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker is crucial to me as a voter. You're failing me, Google.
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