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.
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.
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.
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.
I was joking, but we are speaking about taste, not interest. Since you usually make friends in the social circles you inhabit, it would be likely that your friends share similar if not the same interests.
On the flip side, not every one who is kind and decent will be a good friend to you.
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?
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."
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.
