They must be busy down at Mountain view. Barely a day seems to go by when they don’t launch something new. I feel like the number of times I write ‘here’s a new service from Google’ has gone off the scale. And we haven’t even talked about Google Wave yet!

Well… predictably… here’s a new service from Google…

In its never ending quest to provide ever more relevant search results, Google has launched a ‘social search’ service.

In a nutshell, this allows you to search for stuff; the search engine results pages (SERPs) are populated just with information posted by those in your social networks.

This might include information that people in your social networks have posted on Facebook and Twitter. But it might also include any entries they’ve made on blogs, forums, or other services such as Picasa.

At the moment the feature is only available in Google Labs.

Let’s say for example that you’re looking searching for a place to eat in the West End. Wherever a friend or colleague has made a comment or recommendation about a restaurant, their entries will be displayed in the SERPs.

The service is able to identify posts made by those a social network by making use of users’ Google profile. We wrote previously about how to set up your Google profile. The Google profile allows Google to link up services such as Gmail, Twitter, Friendfeed and LinkedIn.

Google are anxious to stress that they will only surface publicly available information, and not data and information from private or secure services.

“All the information that appears as part of Google Social Search is published publicly on the web – you can find it without Social Search if you really want to. What we’ve done is surface that content together in one single place to make your results more relevant,” said Murali Viswanathan, product manager at Google.

For information about how it all works, here’s a video by the mighty Matt Cutts that describes what’s going on:

As we’ve mentioned before, personal recommendations are the most likely reason to buy a product. Social Search makes it more important than ever to try and get recommendations from your customers, since these recommendations will be more likely to be read and followed by those in their social networks.

Can you see a future of social search? Are you interested to see the search results populated with information provided by those in your social network? Leave us a comment below.