Google has come up with new addition to its ever evolving search engine through Google Labs – Google Social Search. Google Social search combines results from your friend’s blogs, Flickr, Twitter, FriendFeed, and a wide variety of other social media sites (so long as your friends have connected their social accounts to their Google profiles) with Google’s regular search results.

Suppose if you type a search word, the results obtained in search results would be same as would have been without this service, but additional search results would be displayed at the bottom under the heading ‘Results from people in your social circle’ and it might display your friends’ blogs or other social info containing the keywords under this category of search results. With Social Search, Google finds relevant public content from your friends and contacts and highlights it for you at the bottom of your search results. You may filter your results so that you may just see the results from your social search by clicking ‘ Show Options’ on results page and clicking ‘Social’. If you use Gmail, your chat buddies and contacts in your friends, family, and coworkers groups would also be included. And if you use Google Reader, some websites from your subscriptions will also be included as part of your social search results.

This might prove to be a great value add in the search options of Google specially after Bing-Twitter deal few days back. Probably this type of comprehensive results of all social circle on all sites was still missing in searches and Google’s idea of capitalising on this might prove to be a popular addition with increasing use of social networking sites. You can activate this feature from Google Social Search

Also a small video regarding the same launched by Google

This features presents you with a grid of images which you can browse through by scrolling down.Each image will display details when you place the cursor over it.You do not need to know the exact name,you can recognize using the image and narrow down to your required result.This feature can prove very handy when you are shopping for some branded products or you wish to search for some celebrity,personality,sports star etc.You can easily view the images and place cursor over them to see the details.

Suppose if you search for ‘premeir league players’ ,it’ll show you grid of images of players from premier league.You can then place curson over each player to know the name and statistics of the player and then select the one you actually wished to search for.Also you can filter your results by player earnings,matches played etc.

There are more than 100 visual galleries ranging from movies, books, and cars to products, animals, and sports teams. The sorting criteria changes from category to category.For players it could be player statistics like matches played, earnings etc,for motor bikes it could be mileage,price,engine capacity etc.

This feature is powered by Microsoft’s Silverlight technology,which makes the animations and visual rendering possible. The content for Visual Search is provided by several sources.It is a unique feature provided by Microsoft and seems to be quite useful in certain instances.

nMicrosoft is coming up with unique features and continuously updating the services to match upto its main competitor Google.Though it won’t be easy to make a dent onto Google’s market share,but with innovative ideas and  new services , Microsoft may have begun a battle in which it has not much to loose.Ultimately users will decide if they wish to switch on to Bing and experience some not seen till now or they wish to remain with the most reliable search engine Google.