Google's Marissa Mayer Oct. 21 unveiled Google Social Search, a pending opt-in service that will let users with Google accounts, profiles and contacts find content created by people in social networks such as Twitter and FriendFeed. The news came just hours after Microsoft executives announced that Bing would be surfacing search results with Twitter tweets and Facebook status updates in real time. Google already has millions of users for its general search engine. If even a fraction of these millions begin using Google Social Search, it might not leave much room for challengers such as Aardvark, Mahalo and ChaCha.


A key Google search executive unveiled Google Social Search at the Web 2.0 Summit Oct. 21, attempting to upstage significant announcements from search challenger Microsoft Bing.
Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience at Google, got permission to make a surprise announcement this afternoon at the show here, mere hours after Microsoft executives announced that Bing would be surfacing search results with Twitter tweets and Facebook status updates in real time.
Mayer did a me, too play. When she took the stage, she told the audience that Google would also begin enabling users to search Twitter tweets in the coming months before demonstrating Social Search.