At an event
in August, Marissa Mayer, Google’s leading VP in search, said social
search hasn’t shown much promise, but if it does, Google would be in a
good position to incorporate it. I wrote about that here.

Now,
in an interview with VentureBeat (see Q&A below), she says she
considers social search to be an essential part of the leading search
engine in coming years.

She hints Gmail may be used to identify your friends, using their
search history to influence search results for you and those in your
social network. While this network would likely first be built on Gmail
contacts, Marissa wouldn’t rule out importing friends from third-party
networks down the road. But it’s clear Google wants to have the user
explicitly approve them. For now, influencing search results based on
information gathered from your MySpace friend connections is a relative
non-starter, she says, because such influences haven’t been explicitly
approved by MySpace users. She is hopeful users will adopt an
annotation model, though — meaning that they write reviews about
websites and broadcast them to their friends. Google hasn’t implemented
these ideas yet. But I wouldn’t be surprised to see if it’s in the
works.

Source: VentureBeat

As Google found out many times before, it is hard to do everything. Social Search may be the future but Google isn’t a “social” company and therefore, if someone will succeed at social search, it isn’t going to be google. As with videos (the purchase of YouTube), maybe a Facebook acquisition can fix that? Time will tell.
Sahar.

Read the complete post at http://www.conceptualist.com/fedclick.php?ref=http://www.conceptualist.com/2008/01/31/google’s-marissa-mayer-social-search-is-the-future/&id=1414