An update to Google Social Search

I wonder how exactly these results figure into the ranking algorithm. How authoritative does a link shared by a "friend" on twitter have to be in the page-rank sense, for instance? Depending on this threshold, it might suddenly become even more important for a website to have a good social media presence (alternatively, spamming on twitter might become more attractive).

Also, I think Bing launched something similar over a year ago, at least from Twitter and Faceboook (see http://www.discoverbing.com/facebook/) .

This is several steps in the right direction. Good stuff.

One thing though - some people in my social circle are (obviously) more important than others. Is there a way that links from these folks are ranked higher than those from less important people? If not, this is something that should be configurable by the user (e.g. "See more links from Jack [x]" or "See less links from Mary [x]").

I really hope this will get further developed, because it can blur SEO as we know it today.

Not that experts will not be able to utilize their network of site owners, but the results will be even more personalized, and when nobody can permanently rank #1 on Google for any keyword, searchers win.

It's amazing to me how Twitter has become such a valuable and useful source of information compared to Facebook. Especially considering the 140 character limit.

So I have no problem with Twitter being incorporated into my search results.

I wonder how Greplin feels about this, it's certainly covering some of the same territory that they're in.