Yesterday, Google launched their much-talked-about social search functionality, which much more tightly links their core search product with Orkut, no wait Google Buzz, erm  Google+, their latest folly…I mean social network. Easy-to-make jokes at Google’s expense aside, this new development is Kind Of A Big Deal. Others have already blogged about the functionality that this new update offers, so I’ll just summarise and paraphrase here.

Basically, if you’re logged into your Google+ account, when you search using Google you’ll see, as well as “normal” search results, a whole raft of social content as well, from Google+ updates by your friends, Picasa photos, Google+ profiles and pages, as well as a whole bunch of other exciting content, like anything your friends have shared or +1′d using Google+. How lovely. And if you’re feeling anti-social, possibly because you live in a basement and are allergic to sunlight, you can turn it all off and just use normal “global” search.

At least, in theory all this is true. However, since this is a staggered roll-out, like most Google updates, I am unable to actually see any of these options, settings or shiny new toys. So I suggest you take a look at the two blog posts mentioned earlier, as well as following the link on the Google homepage to this page which details all the specifics of the “Search, plus your world” update with pictures and videos.

But I feel there’s another problem here as well. I have no friends. More specifically, no friends that regularly use Google+ and share content through it. Everyone I know just uses Facebook. Which is a bit of a problem that tempers my enthusiasm for this new update. Maybe I’m just a cynic, but I feel there is a heavy element of inertia with the general public in terms of switching over to Google+ as their main social network. While Google have gone some way to expand the user base beyond marketing gurus, tech geeks, and habitual early adopters, particularly by including Google+ as a core app on current-gen Android phones (opening up a whole new tech geek niche) I have to say, neither I nor anyone else in the Red or Blue office seem to use Google+ as our primary social network for sharing the kinds of content that is intended to appear in the new social search function, and following a quick survey, this seems to be reasonably typical for most people.

So to summarise, an exciting development to Google’s core search product, and one that has interesting potential, but hampered by the same problem Google+ itself faces. How do you get people using G+ instead of Facebook? Or maybe I just need to get some friends.

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