Google announced last week at the Web 2.0 summit that it was working on a social search feature, but also stated that it will be weeks before it went public. Social search taps into your social networks profiles and then displays relevant links and status updates from all your friends across your social profiles have shared and then displays them at the bottom of the search page. Google states that, Social Search will improve your search results on Google by providing you with personal relevant search results.

In order for you to start using Social Search you first have to go to Google Labs experimental section and then activate the Social Search Feature. Social Search will only be available in US and English for now.

From what networks?

Social Search will tap into three different sources, so you will need at least one of these accounts to make Social Search work, I would say at least Google profile would be best, if you don’t have one go make one here.

Social Search uses your Gmail’s contacts that you have created with your friends and coworkers for email and chatting with Google Talk. Social Search also uses your Google Reader subscriptions and all the social networking profiles that you have linked into your Google Profile.

Now you don’t need a Google Profile, this is the place with all your social networking profiles for Social Search to gather information from friends. Based on the information you give in your Google Profile, Google can now auto-detect all of your social networking profiles and your friends connected to services like Facebook, Flikr, FriendFeed, YouTube, Reddit, Digg, BrightKite, and  so many others.

How it Works.

Once you have activated Social Search, It’s results will appear at the bottom of your stand search results page and will be clearly labeled as “results from people in your social circle.” Goggles search evangelist Matt Cutts pointed out is that it is important to note that not every search will trigger the Social Search results. Now when it does, the  search results should be highly relevant to your search query .

You may also manually trigger Social Search from your search options panel while you are logged in. There, Google will now present a list of all your friends that it thinks that are closely relevant to the key phrases you were searching for.  By clicking on a name you can restrict your results even further and see results from just one person or two people.

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Google has finally decided to open a Twitter account. It is attached to a random googler and the bio states “news and updates form Google”.

The first tweet was created around 7pm EST last night, and Google already has 24,149 followers. They are following 58 other people mostly fellow Googlers, and Googles products. Biz stone, Evan Williams, Pete Cashmore.

The Google Twitter account was long overdue, but well liked as the number of followers shows you. First of all, this enables Google to have yet another outlet for distributing updates about the company.

The list of follower is a good way to find other Googlers to follow like Matt Cutts @mattcutts. The Google product accounts like Google Reader are not just throwing links to their blog posts either. For every one that want to keep up with every Google detail, this is the account to follow.

Tonight: Ning will be introducing some new chat functions, giving Ning administrators the ability to integrate a rich chat environment for their users. Ning’s new chat system is flash-based, allowing users to have a chat bar along the bottom of the screen. Users have the ability to chat through an interface at the bottom of the screen, or can pop-out their chats into a new windows. Although the interface will remain consistant through out each netowork, users are not able to chat with users out side of the current network they are on.

Putting Ning’s growth in chat aside, Ning has been posting really impressive stats recently, they have grown to 4.8 million uniques in january ( 368% growth year over year) even though they recenty banned pornography networks, and we all know porn used to be the most sought out thing online, until recently when social networks passed it up!

Last Tuesday Google Maps made a small tweak, finally. Now, instead of showing just the top ten results for local search on the map, now it shows all of them. It’s still going to show you the top ten with the map markers, but now little circles will also show up, showing all the other places that may be closer but did not show up before.

This will be good for smaller businesses and smaller restaurants to gain visibility. But it currently does not work on mobile devises or other websites, Google says that other domains that use Google maps will not be supported yet but in the future. For now, the only way to see these new results are by going to Google Maps search page.

Google has recently announced canonical tags. Now this is great because it allows everyone to fix the duplicate content issue. For instance you site has identical or very similar content that can be accessed through multiple URLs, this tag provides you with more control with the URL that comes up in the search results.

Check out this quick video of Matt Cutts from Google speaking with webpronews.com