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.

We’ve talked a lot about Search engine optimisation here on this blog. Boosting your website’s rank in the Search Engine Results Page is an important way to increase relevant traffic to your website.

But what about your own personal profile? It’s not widely appreciated, but ‘people search’ – searching for people online – makes up a large amount of search queries on all the major search engines.

This is another opportunity for Search Engine Optimisation. If you’re well known, or even moderately known – in your industry, your local area, or your business, then people may well be searching for you rather than your business.

But if they search for you, will they actually find you? The thing is, unless you’re called Zaphod Beeblebrox, the chances are that you share your name with a few other people.

Worse case scenario? Lets say your name is John Smith. Here’s what happens when I search for John Smith.

Am I looking for the Book Shop, the Beer, the Folk singer, the Admiral or the Politician?

So how do you make sure that people who are looking for you are able to find you?

Enter stage left: ‘Google profiles’. Google profile is a single web page created and edited by yourself that includes information about who you are and what you do.

To set up a Google profile page for yourself, you will need a Google account, which you can sign up for here. Once you’ve got one of those, click ‘create a profile on the upper left hand side. You can now start creating and editing your personal information.

You can include personal information such as a short biography; your interests; links to your social profiles on place such as Twitter and Facebook; facts about yourself; and even a few photos. Your profile also offers a way for people to contact you without giving out your email address.

If you want to use your Google profile to help people find your website, then it’s important to include links to your website. It is of course an opportunity to promote your website too.

Once you’re happy with your listing, hit save. It should look somthing like this:

It will take a couple of weeks for Google to index your Google profile page, but once it does so you should see it appearing in the Search Engine Results Page (SERPs) when you search using your name.

Since it is Google itself who are providing this service, you can expect a ‘Google’ profile page to appear high up the SERPs. So unless you share your name with a celebrity of other high profile industry veteran, you can make sure that people searching for you will always be able to find you.

Set up a Google profile, use it to promote you Sitebuilder website, and leave your comments below!