A new announcement from google at the Web 2.0 conference in SF, Google (Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of search products and user experience), said it would launch the new experiment in Google Labs called ’social search’.

Once these details have been tracked for the first time, search results from social networks will always appear at the bottom of the page with a note of which network the information has been pulled from.

For example - if users have recently visited New Zealand and written anything about it on a social network or a blog, social search will pull in these results at the bottom of the page.

Google has also built social search into its image search. When searching for a celebrity, for example, George Clooney, the new opt-in feature will also bring up photos of real friends also called George, at the bottom of the image results page.

“This is great from a precision and relevance standpoint,” said Ms Mayer. “Social search recognises a fundamental need for real-time information and demonstrates Google’s commitment to innovating in search.”

Google has also signed a search deal with Twitter on the same day Microsoft’s Bing declared its partnership with the microblogging service.

Only a few hours earlier, Microsoft announced it had signed a deal with Twitter and Facebook to include its users’ status updates in Bing’s search results, at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco.

Google says…

“We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months. That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favourite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.”