This past week, a surprise announcement was made by Google at the Web 2.0 Summit. Marissa Meyer, the Vice President of search products and user experience revealed their latest product,  Social Search. In just a few weeks, Social Search will be launched as a Google Labs experiment. Basically, what this means, is that you will be able to find content created by people in your social networks such as Twitter, FriendFeed, ect.  For example, if you were to enter “London” into Social Search, you would find content that people in your networks have published about the city. You may find blog posts, tweets and photos that describe the experience they had there.

To use Social Service, users must be signed into their Google Account, Google Contacts and must have a Google Profile, where users list the various social networks they are members of. It will even be able to cross-reference information about users from their networks with their Gmail accounts, determining who they are connected to.

Interestingly enough, this big news came just hours after Microsoft announced that Bing’s search results would feature tweets and Facebook status updates in real-time. I think both of these tools are great and I will probably give Social Search a try since I already have a Google account set up. The way people search for information is changing and it’s important that Google and Microsoft are adapting their services to meet user’s needs. I think it will be beneficial to see content that my friends and contacts have created about a term I am searching for. It should be useful information since many of the people in my network have similar interests to me.

What do you think about these new search options? Will you actually use them or do you think this is just something else adding to the social media frenzy? Either way, this once again shows that people are using new tools to receive information. I am looking forward to what will come next!