This morning I received an email about Google’s update to their social search results, a feature Google has been experimenting visibly with for the last year.

While I was impressed with the technology back then it was really nothing to write home about. To Google’s defense, they have been determined to understand the value of integrating social within the framework of search. I made a short video clip back in January, when the Toyota domino recalls were happening – this is what it looked like nearly a year ago.

Since then, Google has made vast improvements and beneficial enhancements to how they have integrated social into search. It is less intrusive. They show the real-time updates subtly instead of the constant scrolling updates.

If you do choose to click on the recent social updates below the news results, you’ll be taken to a real-time search results update page, a trending timeline and the – pièce de résistance – top links! See video clip below.

Initially, I looked at this page and said, “Okay, this is pretty cool but who cares?” So I took a closer look and came up with a few good ways all of us marketers may be able to take advantage of this new offering from Google:

Trending

• Share Something New: The majority of people who are RTing on Twitter, commenting/sharing on Facebook and other social platforms are most likely saying the same thing over and over and over again. This is your chance to share something new. Join in the banter, but offer a fresh perspective, valuable piece of information or other. Something that out of all 585 comments yours will standout because you are offering a new sound into the noise. Incidentally, at the time when I looked on Wordloo.com this morning to get the top trending search, the most popular item was “Beyonce Pregnant” – just in case you are curious about the title of this post – we thought we would play along in the trend and offer up some new information to be shared (highly irrelevant to the folks that care about Beyonce’s pregnancy, by the way, Beyonce congratulations).
• Profile Audiences: Without going into too much detail on this, clearly the folks commenting on Beyonce being pregnant are not the same folks commenting on Virginia Thomas, but it is a good way to understand what your target audience is most interested in (if you don’t know this already).

Top Links

• Early Bird Gets the Worm: If you can’t be the first to create the news, you can be the first to comment on it, and quite possibly get a link from it. If you can watch (obsessively) for trending topics in your industry, Google will show you who is the most authoritative for that trend – get a comment on there – maybe with your link and you’ve got exposure.
• Identify Authority Sites: If you aren’t the early bird, you may still be able to get the worm. By observing which sites are visible for your target topics, you will discover new opportunities for SEO, such as who to interview or be interviewed by, guest write for and comment on.

These are just a few ways Google’s new social search can benefit you, there are several more.

What is your take on social search results?

It was just announced that Facebook pages will now be a part of Google’s real-time results. There is still no way of knowing if or when your status updates will also start to appear but pay attention, this is a major game changer. If you thought changing your privacy settings on your Facebook profile was going to keep everyone on the outside, think again. Last week we sat in on a webinar on Bing’s search engine and one feature hit a nerve with us – how and from where Bing pull images into their results.

We took a closer look by searching our own company name “liberty interactive marketing” in Bing’s images tab and found that profile pictures of our Facebook fans came up for our very own company name.

The key point to highlight here is that there is no such thing as privacy. There is only perceived privacy. There are loopholes. Kind of like when you join an association, purchase membership, or opt-in to any program – many companies use that “relationship” as a legitimate reason to contact you or loan out your information. In this case, the relationship of you fanning a company page may be permission by proxy to Facebook then to Bing (given their new relationship with Facebook) to pull in any data they want….this includes your mug or at some point status updates.

While both Google and Bing are figuring out real-time search and what data makes sense to display as a result (primarily trending for now), Facebook is slowly opening up the gates of information and in my opinion, in all the wrong ways.

Facebook is taking the fun out of Facebook. I would really like to be wrong in this prediction, but this direction seems to be headed down the wrong road. Why?

Because of the unknown. Google plans on more than 550 updates to their algorithm in the coming year (they made over 450 in 2007), their search engine algorithm is smart, really smart. There is no telling how the engineers will figure out how to use this data and it may be at your expense.

Privacy is gone. Bing has proven that with its image display.

If this gets your blood boiling, read these articles for more search engine marketing dish:
Facebook Pages Now Part of Google’s Real-Time Results
How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web