About a week ago I noticed (as I’m sure many of you did) a new feature of Google Search, Social Search (BETA). It basically leverages your Google Profile and the information you provided to expand your search into online posts of those you consider friends, followers, etc. While this is another great advancement coming from Google inline toward the “ultimate” goal of semantic search this could potentially cause privacy concerns for some.
Let’s say you have posted an article and didn’t share it with your Twitter followers (for any number of valid reasons), this new search feature could find it and make it available to them anyway. What if you don’t want this to happen? Well, segregating online content is becoming increasingly difficult (but not impossible thanks to Robots.txt and a few other techniques) due to search engines so it is important to remember that once you post something online it’s there for ALL to find and see.
Overall, I think that unifying search across all of your social networks will be a positive experience for most, but keep in mind that “Results from your social circle” will most likely include EVERYTHING you post online under one of your online identities/profiles.
Once online, always online (and now indexed and nicely organized as well) 😉