About this episode

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The term “social search” is starting to creep up more and more in online conversations, but what is it? WebProNews caught up with Johanna Wright, the Director of Product Management for Google Web Search, to get an explanation on what the phenomenon really is. According to Wright, social search is a beta product for both Web and image search that Google launched in January. In other words, Google takes published content from a user’s social network and ranks it as relevant to other users in that same network. Wright gives an example that if her friend, who is also a writer, writes a article about the iPad and if she searches for an iPad, the article will show up in her search results since it is relevant to her. Although she does not believe social search will have a strong impact on marketers, she does offer tips for marketers and publishers. She says: - Make good content that people want to read and follow - Follow webmaster guidelines - Use webmaster tools to make sure your site is indexed in Google In addition, if your site is social, Wright suggests marking it up using Google’s social graph API code that comes from code.google.com. Since Google Buzz is also raising hype, are the two connected? In response, Wright says, “I think that Google Buzz and social search are a great way to marry key components of Google, the company, in a way that’s great for users.”

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