Wajam, a social search extension for the browser, has added Google Plus integration, alongside Facebook and Twitter, so that users can search their friends’ posts across all three major social networks.
The plug-in displays personalized results, accompanied by faces and profiles from social networks, inside normal searches. The Wajam team says they recognizes Google Plus’ appeal as “a viable alternative” to Facebook, but they also criticize it for its lack of deep search features.
Wajam will also display a toolbar over the top of other popular sites, including Wikipedia, eBay, IMDb, and others, whenever it finds results in your social graphs that are relevant.
Currently, Wajam’s results are aggregated into one database, so the same search will display the same results regardless of where one is searching. Community manager Alain Wong says, “We are still working on making the search results more relevant. We’re working on contextualizing location, photos, that kind of thing, which will help improve the results.”
For now, Wajam results are a bit too simple; they feel like brute keyword searches, which they are. It also takes time for Wajam to index all the various services, so give it a chance to populate. Knowing exactly who posted something is a great shortcut for determining relevance, and Wajam’s explicit social filtering seems like a useful solution.
