What if you were searching the Web and there was a dedicated section of search results with relevant content written by your personal contacts? If you take part in a new "experiment" from Google Labs called Social Search, that's exactly what you'll get. As long as you're logged into your Google account and your contacts have added links to their Google profiles, Social Search will supplement your normal search results with info from those close to you.

Why would you possibly want something like this? There are a few scenarios we can think of. Often when you're searching the Web, there's so much information thrown at you that it can be hard to filter the quality of the results—content from your friends is probably more valuable to you than stuff from some random people on the other side of the world. So, for example, if you want a killer recipe for a casserole and search for "broccoli casserole," you'll still get your normal search results. But below them, you'll also get a section that says "Results from people in your social circle for broccoli casserole" and a list of links to your friends' blogs with their own killer recipes, all in one convenient place.

Another scenario is one outlined by the Official Google Blog—you might be searching for information about a certain locale (New York, in this case) and your friends might have posted some tourist tips that are of more interest to you than the typical smattering of search results. According to Google, Social Search will only aggregate publicly available information (worry not about your private postings) and yes, you could find that info on your own if you went around to every blog and searched for "New York"—the point is to collect that content together in one place to make your search results more relevant.

Of course, there are downsides to Social Search. For one, it only includes links from people who are listed as your Google contacts—your mom, who may not have a Google account, won't be included—or those you're connected to through certain social services. (For example, Social Search shows me results from Hot Doug's, an awesome encased meat emporium in Chicago, because Hot Doug's is someone I follow on Twitter).

Needless to say, there might be a few more steps involved than the average person might take, meaning that it's likely only the geekiest of your friends will show up in Social Search for now.

Still, we went into this thinking Social Search would be yet another boring social networking aggregator, but were surprised to find otherwise. Getting search results from people I know and associate with is really cool, and helps make Google's search results more valuable to me. Google says Social Search should be available to everyone today, but you have to sign up through Google Labs before the results will start showing up.