The incredible pace at which Search is evolving is phenomenal. Google has been enabling Google Social Search by default for those that are logged in to Google. Previously it was optional to try it through google labs, but now when you search on Google.com and you are logged into your google account, you will notice social search results at the bottom of the page. I noticed it wasn’t working on google.co.uk yet, but that can be far behind.

How does Google Social Search impact search engine marketing?

While it’s still early to tell here are some initial impressions:

1) Google is competing with facebook and utilizing the social web in a very clever way

2) Social Search is another opportunity for ordinary people, social media mavens, experts and marketers to influence who ever they can connect with.

3) In search engine optimisation world, it is evident that:

Saying you are #1 in google is not what it used to be….

Now that search results pages are becoming increasingly varied depending on who is searching, where they are searching, what they have searched before and what their social connections have voted on, it is harder to talk about static search positions and near impossible to track reliable rankings for webpages.

Organic search ranking positions outside the top 3 are more and more liable to be replaced by richer search results coming from video search, news results, blog results, image results and social circle results.

4) The value of creating high quality content is more lucrative than ever. With search results being influenced by your social network and by social media activity in general, crappy content will sink to the bottom and hopefully great content will float to the top more reliably than before.

5) Marketing and promoting without a presence on relevant social networks is not to be advised. Find out where your customers are online and be a participant there!

6) People with huge networks and followings just gained a lot of potential influence… too much influence?