Google social search has been released to the public after just two months in Google labs. Social search used your friends networks to promote those results higher up in the seach engine, so for example if you are looking for pages from your friend's blog, social search will make sure those pages are easier to find. Also, if you have a friend called John Smith, then your friend's webpages should appear higher than all the other pages by different John Smiths. The social network uses your google profile to create the social networks - gmail chat contacts, friendfeed, twitter (but not facebook yet). There is even social search in google images using data from your flickr account.

In SEO terms, this is another evolution that we need to keep up with. Personalised search is already making SEO more tricky, and having social networks as part of your SERPs just means that online marketeers will need to utilise social networking more to reach new customers.

The video demo below by Maureen Heymens, technical lead for google social search, shows how social search is used: