{"id":2165,"date":"2009-10-29T07:36:26","date_gmt":"2009-10-29T14:36:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/palblog.fxpal.com\/?p=2165"},"modified":"2009-10-28T22:31:16","modified_gmt":"2009-10-29T05:31:16","slug":"first-squares-now-circles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/?p=2165","title":{"rendered":"First squares, now circles"},"content":{"rendered":"

A while ago, Google introduced Google Squared<\/a>, an attempt to help people keep track of different aspects in their search results. I think that it’s an interesting HCIR idea that still lacks a good implementation, as I’ve written here<\/a> and here<\/a>. Recently, Google introduced a means of adding results informed by the searcher’s social network, which Google has dubbed “Social Circle<\/a>.” I spent some time playing with it, and found it lacking.<\/p>\n

My ad hoc<\/em> evaluation consisted of typing in a few queries and exploring the results. In addition to the normal set of “organic” results, Google inserts a heading titled “Results from people in your social circle for …”. Clicking on this link opens the “social” results. For the query “collaborative search” it identified a couple of blog posts on the FXPAL blog and on Jeremy Pickens<\/a>‘ personal blog. Not particularly useful, given that I already knew about these blogs. Pretty much the same results were obtained for the query “exploratory search”, and “information seeking.” The query “visualization techniques” produced just a couple of hits on the FXPAL blog.<\/p>\n

The Google site describes the Social Circle as<\/p>\n

… a combination of your Gmail chat buddies, your Gmail contacts friends, family and co-worker groups, and people you’re publicly connected to on other social sites (such as Twitter and FriendFeed).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So why is it only returning results from my own blog and from Jeremy’s? Why not from TheNoisyChannel<\/a>, which is certainly in my social circle? Why doesn’t find Brynn Evans<\/a>‘ blog, and Ed Chi<\/a>‘s blog which also deals with some of the same issues? And what about all the tweets related to these topics? Well, it turns out that I have to configure my Google profile to define my social circle. I suppose it should have been obvious, but they could also have done a better job of explaining what needs to happen for this feature to work.<\/p>\n

I added a bunch of blogs I follow to Google Reader, added my Twitter URL to the list of URLs, and accepted the suggestion to include my home page. Yet the search results remain unchanged: two hits on the FXPAL blog, and two on IRGupf<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So my initial impressions (using cognitive dimensions<\/a> terminology) of Google’s social circle are<\/p>\n