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Continuing on its path of creating madly innovative tools for search and emerging media, Google introduced Social Search back in January. It allows you to see what people in your social circle have searched for and posted about the topics you are searching for.
Here are some of the types of content you might see in Google Social Search results:
* Websites, blogs, public profiles, and other content linked from your friends’ Google profiles
* Web content, such as status updates, tweets, and reviews, from social services that your friends have listed in their Google profiles
* Images posted publicly from your social circle on Picasa Web and from websites linked from their Google profiles
* Relevant articles from your Google Reader subscriptions
Go here to see a list of your social circle connections.
Google Insights
Last week, at the Ad Age Digital conference in New York, Google’s Chief Economist, Hal Varian, talked about the role of data analysis and experimentation in business decision making.
You can now learn in real time by using the new Google’s Insights for Search to explore the kinds of things people are searching for. You can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties. See examples of how you can use Google Insights for Search.
For example: Insights can help you determine which messages resonate best. For example, an automobile manufacturer may be unsure of whether it should highlight fuel efficiency, safety, or engine performance to market a new car model.
Insights can be a helpful tool in creating brand associations. Take, for example, an advertising agency that needs to build a compelling advertising campaign for its client, a computer hardware company. The agency needs to know what competing brands are doing: how should they position their client’s product against them?
Google’s goal, he said, is “best performance and continuous improvement to translate results of their continuing experiment into learning you can apply.”
It always makes me happy to see my three shares of Google stock hard at work :>)