MisterWebNet

With the news that Google has launched a social search feature (available in Google Labs) thought I'd point out the usefulness of social networks and google in general:

Funny as these are, the ever increasing drive to localise and get real up to the minute results is an important development in search engines. Twitter has agreed deals with both Bing and Google to index it's constant feed of tweets. It's the first time that search engines have both paid for content (financial terms of the deal are undisclosed) and attempted to integrate real time results into search with any degree of success.

Google, having (slowly) integrated it's news results into searches, is integrating social networks as  the next step to increasing relevancy of the results. Social networks are attractive for search engines as it it highly likely that results from 'friends' within social networks are unlikely to be spam, will have a high degree of relevancy to a search and can also be updated in real time. But it faces problems in that many social networking sites (such as facebook) block user's data behind a wall of privacy.

Could Google end up having to pay for user content on social networks like the deal with twitter? Highly unlikely. Firstly users might object strongly to facebook or another social network selling 'their' data. Secondly, by paying sites for content, Google opens the door to having to pay a whole range of websites for content. Thirdly, facebook is looking at creating it's own search engine/portal/gateway type site so allowing Google to index (and thus remove an important incentive for users to visit social networks) it's content and have it accessible outside of facebook is not an attractive proposition.