We’ve written about Wajam a few times. It’s a social search tool that you can add as a browser extension, which displays results from your social networks at the top of Google or Bing search results. For example, I can search for “shoes,” and if anyone I’m connected to via Twitter or Facebook (or other sources) has said anything about shoes lately, those results will show up at the top of the page.
Today, Wajam announced that it is now including Google Circles in the mix.
“When we heard about the launch of Google’s newest foray into social networks this past month, we were excited,” Wajam community manager Alain Wong wrote in a blog post. “Although Google Buzz was introduced with lofty intentions, and Google Wave had the potential to disrupt, both products never hit the spot. With the launch of Google+, it looks like Google finally hit a home run.”
“Once Google+ launched, we immediately started thinking about what it meant for Wajam users, and what it meant for the social search landscape,” said Wong. “Some early critics focused on the lack of search in Google+ and on the need for alternatives. Other people were closing their Facebook profiles now that there was a viable alternative. From these reactions, we understood that people wanted the freedom to choose their preferred networks, so it made perfect sense to add Google+ to our social search plugin.”
It’s not just on the major search engines that Wajam users might run across unexpected, but potentially useful results from their friends. A few weeks ago, Wajam launched “Wajam Everywhere,” which also shows you results at the top of various popular sites, such as: TripAdvisor, IMDB, Wikipedia, Yelp, Walmart, BestBuy, Overstock, etc.
This way you might see some related opinions from friends on things you are already looking at. Now, that includes people in your Google+ Circles.
Meanwhile, Google has yet to implement a useful search feature (beyond just people search) in Google+, although there are still ways to search it.
Of course Google does its own brand of social search in its own regular web search results, I’m still partial to the Wajam method which places them in a box where you know these types of results are going to appear every time, and now they even appear at more places across the web, which can be useful at best, and interesting in other cases.
For example, maybe you seeing a thumbs down from a co-worker about a certain movie while you’re searching IMDB isn’t enough to make you change your mind about whether or not you want to watch it, but it might still give you some more insight into the kinds of things that person does like, which in an increasingly social search landscape, can give you clues as to how much you want to trust their opinions in other matters.