Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, FriendFeed & Flickr are all pretty common names in the social networking world, but now social and search are about to combine thanks to Google.

At the Web 2.0 expo last week, Google’s Vice-President of Search Marissa Mayer surprised everyone with the announcement that Social Search is coming via Google Labs.

This new search feature will allow you to see search query results from people in your social network. By using your Google Profile, (if you fill it out with the other social networks you’re a member of, such as FriendFeed) Google will scan who you are connected to and give your results from those people if they are relevant to your search query.

At the expo, Mayer demonstrated how a search for ’New Zealand’ produced a list of search results that included relevant content from friends half-way down the search results page. Among the search results were links from different friends, the first to a Gmail message that mentioned New Zealand and the second, a FriendFeed entry.

Although it was only announced a few days ago, Social Search has already generated quite a lot of buzz and has a number of “internet experts” rejoicing. This includes Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land who said

It was pretty impressive. I don’t see a lot of things that make me go “wow,” that’s useful. This did.

Mayer was a pretty much closed book when it came to divulging further information about Social Search. So we will have to keep you updated as more is announced from Google.

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