Google makes search more personal

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Google has announced three features designed to make search more personal.

The first is Personal Results, which presents users with contacts' Google+ posts and photos for whatever terms they search.

"This is search that truly knows me, and gives me a result page that only I can see," said Amit Singhal, Google Fellow, in a blog post.

"And while I get a nice mix of personal results with results from the web, I can also click the link at the top of the results page (red arrow) for the option to search only within my world."

This is search that truly knows me, and gives me a result page that only I can see.

The second major addition is Profiles in Search, which means when users search for a friend’s name, Google will bring up a personalised profile prediction in autocomplete.

The new People and Pages feature links the other two additions by finding people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic.

"Starting today, if you search for a topic like [music] or [baseball], you might see prominent people who frequently discuss this topic on Google+ appearing on the right-hand side of the results page," Singhal added.

"You can connect with them on Google+, strike up meaningful conversations and discover entire communities in a way that simply wasn’t possible before."

In a bid to maintain privacy for users, Google has provided "interface elements and control settings" similar to those found on Google+.

A toggle on the upper right of the results page, meanwhile, will let users see what their search results look like without personal content.

The "Search plus Your World" changes will roll out to signed-in English users on Google.com in the next few days. See below for a video explaining the new features.

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