Here is Googles’ official line:

A lot of these options have been present (but somewhat hidden from view) up until now:

The new design really pushes the options making the Google SERPS look similar in style to Yahoo or Bing.

One of the most notable additions is that Google are now pushing the so called social search and real-time search results (see the screenshot below) which details a search for Gordon Brown (the morning after the night before) and shows the relevant Twitter updates.

New Google search for Gordon Brown shows Twitter updates

What this means for businesses:

• Businesses will have to update their sites and offsite content so that they appear under as many filters (options) as is reasonably possible including blogs, videos etc.
• Businesses will have to participate in the online community; it’s getting harder and harder to ignore Twitter by the day.

Essentially Google are trying to present us with the most relevant information, our friends and connections are like us, so it follows that we are interested to hear what they say about the places, products and services that we are interested in.

To make social search work a user must have and be signed into their Google Profile (http://www.google.com/profiles) they must also connect that profile to at least one social networking site so that Google can start to identify their “Social Circle”.  When a user searches with their Google Profile enabled Google will find relevant public content from their friends and contacts and highlight it within the search results.

Google have been gravitating towards a more personalised search experience for some time http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/02/personally-speaking.html and have also been bumping up new content in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP’s) for a while.

Essentially then Google continue to strive to provide the most relevant results to it’s users, it will be interesting to see how this develops, my initial thoughts are:

• It will be interesting to see how many people actually know about the Google Profile
• It is unclear how many people provide useful info on places, products and services when they use Twitter, Facebook etc.

To find out more see: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/introducing-google-social-search-i.html