Google still catches me off guard sometimes. Looking at ‘online bingo’ results today, I was surprised to see this result and mistook it for Google News (cut me some slack – it was 8:30 and I’d had no coffee).

Had we written about bingo anytime recently? I didn’t recall and it seemed like a mentalist subject to blog about. Anyway, I clicked through to find this story about bingo and AdWords… from March 30th.

At first I didn’t get it. But then I didn’t get why the story was accompanied by a weird blank avatar thing. Or why, next to Dave’s name it said “connected via Twitter.com”. And then, the fogs lifted and I read the title above the link and I finally remembered – social search. Social search looks for connections between your Google accounts and such and tailors your results to include them.

Is this result a great advertisement for the feature? I wouldn’t say so. Just because I know Dave doesn’t mean I’m interested in some guff he was saying 6 months ago. Social lives move on pretty rapidly – I would have thought that ‘recency’ would be a critical part of the algorithm for anything related to the social sphere.