Brands that reach out on social networks will find their results showing up more often on their connections' search results pages. And as always, those that create content that people find interesting will be rewarded, only now that will be multiplied as more users become interconnected.

Singhal emphasized that all content included in these results is already publicly available to anyone, so nothing the creator hasn't already shared publicly will be revealed. That would rule out including most Facebook content in the results, as that content is restricted to viewing by a user's Facebook friends, he said.

In addition, the results are filtered through Google's relevance algorithms, so it's not showing social search results when they're not going to improve the search experience, Matt Cutts, Google's search evangelist, told ClickZ.

"It uses PageRank, and all the signs that Google uses for determining reputation and relevance," Cutts said. "It only triggers when there's a really useful result."

Singhal, who has been using the product for several months now, said the relevancy ranking algorithms applied to social search have improved the relevance of the search results overall. "Every time I see it come up, there's a 'wow' effect," he said.

This product is not related to last week's announced deal with Twitter, where Google (and Bing) said they'd begin including Twitter entries in search results.

"This is a filter on public Web content, and not related to any Twitter search," Singhal said. "These results are not from any single service, and they will become even richer as more content becomes open, and as more connections are made between people, or between people and content," he said.

For marketers, this is another indication of the direction Google is heading with its relevancy factors for determining what to return in search results. As with the Twitter "firehose" data, it stands to reason that Google will use what it learns from this Social Search experiment to adjust its current algorithms, or create new ones.