Google advances social search with Search, plus your World

News broke yesterday of Google’s implementation of a new search feature called ‘Search, plus your World.’

The concept is to supplement your standard Google search results with results of items your friends have shared or highlighted that are relevant to your search. Google wants to transform search from not only understanding content, but also understanding people and relationships.

From Google’s official blog, here’s their announcement yesterday of Search, plus your World.

Google Search has always been about finding the best results for you. Sometimes that means results from the public web, but sometimes it means your personal content or things shared with you by people you care about. These wonderful people and this rich personal content is currently missing from your search experience. Search is still limited to a universe of webpages created publicly, mostly by people you’ve never met. Today, we’re changing that by bringing your world, rich with people and information, into search.

Search is pretty amazing at finding that one needle in a haystack of billions of webpages, images, videos, news and much more. But clearly, that isn’t enough. You should also be able to find your own stuff on the web, the people you know and things they’ve shared with you, as well as the people you don’t know but might want to… all from one search box.

As you’ll see in the below Google video, your search results page will begin to display an icon next to the search box (I’m not seeing yet) by which you can search for ‘personal results.’ You’d then receive in the search results items that your ‘friends’ on social networks (now limited to Google+) had referenced which were relevant to your original search.

I don’t see anything shocking with the news. The idea of social search has been in the works for a long time. You’ve seen for some time small pictures of people you know next to certain search results on Google. Google has previously had an option to display results of searches for items shared by your ‘social network’ in its social search feauture.

Google’s received a ton of criticism over the last 24 hours, especially from Twitter, for not including social search results from other than Google+.

If you’re like me you’ve got a much larger, robust, and mature (you’ve been using for a long time) social network on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Without Google’s ‘Your World’ pulling in references from those networks, my social search is not going to mean much.

Matt Cutts, who works for the Search Quality group in Google, specializing in search engine optimization issues, and who has a reputation for being a straight shooter, responded this morning that ‘Your World’ will pull content from other social networks.

Search plus Your World builds on the social search that we launched in 2009, and can surface public content from sites across from the web, such as Quora, FriendFeed, LiveJournal, Twitter, and WordPress.

The team should be finishing the rollout of Search plus Your World in the next day or so, and I hope you enjoy it. Remember, to see the new results, you’ll need to be signed in with a Google account and search on google.com. Give this new feature a whirl: once you see how much better personal search can be, I don’t think you’ll want to give it up.

I look forward to the expansion of social search. I trust more what my trusted network of ‘friends’ is sharing and saying about items I am searching on more than a random search on Google.