Google has rolled out its new Social Search experiment with an eye toward mitigating the type of criticism that envelops Facebook whenever it updates its news feed or other basic services. In the two-minute, 51-second video below, Google engineer Maureen Heymans patiently explains how Social Search works, and is careful to stress the service's "transparency" (cited four times) and user control/choice (also mentioned four times). The second video, featuring Matt Cutts, also emphasizes that the results are from peoples' public social media content, such as Twitter and blogs, as opposed to private content, such as instant messages.
Note, however, that you may not even notice Social Search; you need to be registered for Google services such as Gmail or Google Docs and signed in to see the results, and it's still being rolled out (we had to manually activate it from the link on the official blog post about the launch). In addition, the results appear at the bottom of the page, meaning those people who don't scroll down the first page of search results will not be aware of Social Search.
Video: Social Search demonstration
Video: How Google Social Search works
Image: Matt Cutts, YouTube screen capture
Sources and research: Explanatory video by Google's Maureen Heymans, Official Google Blog, Google, VentureBeat
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