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Filed under: Google, Social Software, Search, web 2.0

Google's Social Search is now live

Last week, at the Web2.0 Expo, Google demoed a new Social Search feature that delivers targeted search results based on your social circle. Now, this feature is available in Google Labs, so anyone with a Google account can try it out. When social search gives you "results from your social circle," who does it mean? Google looks at your Gmail chat buddies and contacts, as well as your Twitter and FriendFeed buddies and your Google Reader subscriptions to find relevant results. So far, it doesn't seem like Social Search is for everyone, but you should definitely give it a look if you're a social networking junkie.

Social Search results show you which of your connections a particular result came from, and how you're connected to that person. For example, I searched for Download Squad, and found a blog post from fellow Squadder Nik Fletcher, who I follow on Twitter. Results aren't limited to direct connections, though, Social Search also finds more obscure stuff, like your friends-of-friends on Flickr. It's clearly still a work in progress, but right now it's great for finding blog posts by people you know, and keeping up with your friends across the various networks they're signed up for.





Filed under: Social Software, Podcasts, Search, web 2.0

Squadcast 10 - Searching for the future


Can you believe the Squadcast is now on episode 10? Well, we're excited anyway. This week Grant and Christina discuss the future of web search, specifically social search. Christina chats up Jason Calacanis from Mahalo to get the inside scoop on social search and its benefits over traditional methods.

The Squadcast's "The Five" takes a look at five of Download Squad's favorite social search tools and plugins.

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Take the jump for show notes and links to items discussed in this episode.

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Filed under: Web services, Social Software, Search, web 2.0

Mahalo takes human powered search to social extreme


True social powered search arrives today. Mahalo is beefing up its human-powered search engine by letting users submit additional links directly to any of the site's 26,000 human edited search pages.

Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis is announcing the new social link submission network today at the Le Web 3 conference. If Mahalo can attract the right user base, the human-powered search engine could straddle the line between Google and Wikipedia.

Already a year ahead of its published goal to create human edited result pages for 25k of the most popular search terms and, having a declared 400 paid contributors through it's Greenhouse program, Mahalo's next phase blends social networking with search in a way no service has quite attempted before.

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Filed under: Business, Developer, Internet, Google, Yahoo!, Social Software

Yahoo hires a Social Search Strategist

yahoo hires database geniousTrying to one-up Google, Yahoo has just acquired a Database genius. Yahoo hopes to beat out Google by specifically targeting social search.

Raghu Ramakrishnan was formerly a professor of computer sciences at UW Madison, and will now be concentrating on studying links between computer and human search. With the help of Raghu, Yahoo is planning a social attack with its array of recent acquisitions including Flickr, del.icio.us, and its recent Yahoo Answers.

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Graveyard Shift - zombie-busting Time Waster

With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet. They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...

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