Official: Google Adding More & Fresher Tweets To Social Search

Google Social Search — the service that adds content from your social circle to a search results page — appears to be getting an increase in tweets. And fresher tweets, at that.

Social Search relies on what Google knows about your friends and connections (via your Google profile, Google Reader account, etc.) and sometimes shows content from your circle at the bottom of a search results page. That content has, for the most part, been very heavy on articles and blog posts. But here’s what I saw not long ago on a search for [google places]:

That top piece of content is a tweet earlier today from @SEOAware. At four hours old, it’s not exactly “fresh” content. But clicking the link above that tweet — “Results from people in your social circle for google places” — does show very recent tweet content down at the bottom of the page.

In this case, Google is showing a tweet that was less than 15 minutes old. This is obviously a far cry from Google Realtime Search, which is focused on freshness and not targeted to your social circle. But it appears that Google is trying to make Social Search fresher than it’s been so far.

Postscript, October 29: Google has confirmed this in today’s week-in-review blog post, saying:

This week we’ve added real-time to Social Search, so you’ll find the freshest tweets and other updates from your friends right on Google. Here in the Bay Area, everyone has been excited about watching the Giants in this year’s World Series. With our improvements to Social Search, now when you search for information about the game on Google you can see right on the results page if your friends are watching. Just look for the heading “Results from people in your social circle” to check it out.

About The Author

Matt McGee

Matt McGee joined Third Door Media as a writer/reporter/editor in September 2008. He served as Editor-In-Chief from January 2013 until his departure in July 2017. He can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee.