Google has launched major updates to Social Search, integrating information from Twitter, Flickr and Quora throughout its search engine.

The search giant launched Social Search in 2009; the feature integrates search results from your friends at the bottom of the search page. It utilizes social profiles connected to your Google Account to deliver items like photo or blog results that come from your friends.

Google's now making some prominent changes to Google Social Search, and it is announcing three new websites that will appear prominently in social search results. We had a chance to speak with Mike Cassidy, product management director for search, about the changes.

The first major change is that Google Social Search results will no longer appear only at the bottom of the page, but will instead be "blended" throughout the page. This is done through an annotation system that lets you know when a friend has shared a specific link or search result. If your friend writes a blog about how to create honey, that result will have an annotation that your friend has "shared this," either via Google or through one of Google's three major social integrations.







That leads into the second update to social search: a vast increase in its appearance in search. Any content shared by your friends on Quora, Flickr and Twitter can appear as a social annotation in search results. If a friend has tweeted a link to a Mashable article and your Google account is connected to Twitter, you're likely to see an annotation saying that your friend "shared this on Twitter."

The final update focuses on increasing the control users have over what gets displayed in social search. Google has revamped its options page to give users the ability to both publicly and privately connect their social profiles to their Google accounts. It even suggests which social profiles are likely to be the ones you control by cross referencing your friends on Google's network of sites (such as Google Talk or Google Buzz) and seeing if that list matches your friend list on Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.

One thing this update doesn't include is Facebook "Like" data, a prominent feature of Microsoft Bing. Unlike Google, Bing has access to instant personalization and the user data behind Facebook's walled garden. As one of Google's archenemies, it's unlikely the search giant gave much serious thought to deep Facebook integration, instead choosing Quora, Flickr and Twitter as its inaugural integrations.





