Google's recently released Social Search feature, whose raison d'etre is to include content from users' social-network contacts in search results, can barely tap into the connections people have made on Facebook, the world's largest social network.

Social Search, which graduated from an opt-in Google Labs experiment to a default feature on Google.com for signed-in users on Wednesday, will only access Facebook public profile pages, which at best contain bare-bones member information..

The problem is that only a small amount of information from Facebook member profiles can be published publicly on the Web. To access the rest, people have to log into the site.

Granted, Google's Social Search feature isn't the only search service affected by this situation. Microsoft announced back in October that it would at some point this year begin including Facebook member status updates in its real-time search results. That hasn't happened yet, because Facebook members can't make those status updates available in the open Web. Google has also expressed an interest in indexing and returning Facebook status updates in its search results.

More: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9149928/