
I'm starting to see Google search results based on my social circle - AndrewWarner
http://www.google.com/s2/search/social#socialcircle
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DanielBMarkham
I do NOT want my social circle to have influence in my search decisions. It's
only going to encourage more of the groupthink/clanning crap we already have
so bad on the net.

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dws
I'm mixed on this. But it does explain a weird "Google for X, it's on the
first page," "No, it's not!" incident at work that resulted in a 5 minute team
Googlefest.

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Hexstream
It could also be due to <http://www.google.com/history/optout?hl=en>

I disabled this. It's appaling that it's on by default.

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icey
Whoa... Any idea how to turn this off? My friends have terrible taste.

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maddalab
Speaking about taste.... they are your friends :)

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bravura
I know you're joking but it's worth saying: pick your friends because they are
decent and kind people, not because they have the sane interests as you.

~~~
icey
Eh, I thought it was funny :D

Most of my friends are not in the software industry; they're busy Googling how
to operate their AOL subscription, not the nitty gritty of JVM internals.

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andrewcooke
I'm finding Google more and more intrusive. On their help page they say to log
out of your account if you don't want this, but then I lose my gmail
connection. I've tried switching to bing for searches, but it's not as good.
So I am thinking of moving from gmail - does anyone have any good
recommendations as a replacement?

[edit: anyone use runbox?]

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nethergoat
Note that this feature is (for now, at least) designed to add weight to
content _created_ by your social circle. It does not, as I first thought,
modify your search results based on friends' preferences.

From Google's FAQ: "Google Social Search is a feature designed to help you
discover relevant publicly-accessible content from your social circle, a set
of online friends and contacts. The idea is that content from your friends and
social contacts is often more relevant to you than content from strangers. For
example, a movie review from an expert is useful, but a movie review from your
best friend can be even better."

More info here:
[http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...](http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=165228)

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csarva
This is something I've wondered about for a long time and glad to see it being
implemented. The current iteration seems to have lots of random people listed
as first order connections though.

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motters
Interesting. This is almost like becoming a collective brain when searching
for stuff.

