Google rushes out social search tool

Google has released a beta version of its planned search tool for social networking sites, announced last week.

The company had said at the Web 2.0 Summit that the ability to search through Twitter feeds would be added in a few months but the company surprised many by getting it out so soon.

Microsoft's Bing search engine started social networking searches last week.

“Today we're rolling out a new experiment on Google Labs called Google Social Search that helps you find more relevant public content from your broader social circle,” said the company in a blog posting.

“We've taken steps to improve the relevance of our search results with personalisation, but today's launch takes that one step further. With Social Search, Google finds relevant public content from your friends and contacts and highlights it for you at the bottom of your search results.”

Google users can create a profile and add in links to social networks they want covered, such as Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn,as well as Gmail contacts. The search results will then include a scan of those sites for relevant information.

The search results will not include private data, and Google said that any results would only be from information that could be found online by other means.