Google's Social Search

The slight changes in google search results might not be noticeable to anyone who doesn't spend most of their day there, but I was most excited this morning to find that my Google results had updated with (some of) the features.

Most noticeable to me are the following ...

1) Google Image Search - By Colour, Face & Line Art
How awesome is that?! For those of us who use Google to be inspired by the design work of others, you can now refine image search by colour, displaying all results with red or green featured prominently. The colour bar is a 1 click, instant loading display option that sorts images based on their colours. Other options include sorting by face, black and white, photos, line art, clip art etc ... but what effect will this have on the big traffic war between Facebook and Google?

2) Google Social Search - Discussions
For some reason i'm seeing a different type of social search to what was described in Google's introduction video (below) so I think I'm getting a limited version here in the land down under technology reach. Discussions however is an option which allows me to see conversation in forums and blogs, which is just one more step towards an advertising economy driven entirely by social commentary.




3) Wireframes in Google Docs
This is a few weeks old by now but I stumbled on this awesome dude who created some templates to share for free, using the new Google drawing tool. Working with webpages every day means lots of mockups, so we are always looking for clean and simple software to compose wireframes for clients, designers and developers. Add the cloud computing component where the document can be secured or shared to anyone inside or outside your company.

If you just want to doodle a diagram, you can do that too, but to create complex wireframes the best place to start is to visit Morten's shared docs page which is linked below, save a copy of the free templates to your account and edit it to create your own wireframes.

> Here's some templates from Morten Just


These 3 features don't seem that exciting when I see them written, especially in comparison to the open graph announcements by Facebook with over 50,000 sites (apparently) implementing it in less than 2 weeks. They will however make my day to day life easier and will probably still be in my life long after Facebook has faded into little more than one night stand on the digital media relationship timeline.

What's a topic worth without a few good, unanswered questions to ponder? So here ya go ...

How will the new social search effect listings in Google? How will Facebook's open graph effect Google's backward link heavy algorithm and the accuracy that they are so known for? Is it ridiculous for so many social media commentators to be even comparing the likes of Google and Facebook?

You tell me ...