Search Results exclusively from your Personal Social Network

October 21st, 2009, the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco...

Qi Lu, president of Microsoft's online services division, had just announced that Microsoft has integrated Twitter tweets and Facebook status updates into Bing's search results when Google's Vice President of Search Products and User Experience, Marissa Mayer, got up on stage and made her own announcement:

"Earlier today we announced that we reached a partnership agreement with Twitter. So, we will be featuring their tweets in our search results, as well as building a real time search."

Then, she went on to express Google's motive behind the deal.

"We're really excited about that because this is a really fundamental need. There are times when people are searching for things that are varying in the moment and being able to have that comprehensiveness is very important. I think it demonstrates our commitment to innovating in search.... We've been thinking about social networks for a long time at Google--MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, and YouTube. How could social networks help improve the search experience?"

The result?  Google Social Search.

Google's Social Search does not currently have access to much Facebook information because many Facebook users grant limited public's access to their profile information and Facebook doesn't allow for making users' status updates available to the public. According to Maureen Heymans, technical lead for Social Search at Google: “Social Search includes public [social network] connections. Since Facebook's connections aren't public, we can't at this time include them...”