Making good on their promises to add social layers to its search platform, Google has added “shared by” and “recent updates” links to the bottom of some of its results in Google News. The features, however, are merely tests as of right now and both Malcolm Coles and Barry Schwartz can view these features. According to their posts, the former “shared by” feature shows Googlers the amount of people that are currently sharing that exact link with others on sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc. When the link is clicked users will get to see the accounts that are sharing the story and unlike Bing, the users that are sharing on social networking sites are not people that you are following.
With the latter, a blue box appears after a few results and shows how many updates are being made on various social sites about the topic you searched. The difference between “shared by” and “recent updates” is that with the updates feature you are seeing what people are saying about the topic, they aren’t necessarily “retweeting” or “liking” one particular link or another. As Schwartz speculates, Google could eventually make the information that these new features are showing become more social graph specific, like Bing.
Do you think “shared by” and “recent updates” are things you will use? Do you agree with the way Google is integrating social networking into search?
