From Simon Owens on Nieman Journalism Lab, April 18 - While many have been closely following the news of new social network projects from Google — whether it’s Google Wave, Google Buzz, or a rumored project reportedly called Google Me — the search giant has been rolling out a number of products that add a “social layer” to its search, sometimes quietly and other times with official announcements. Most recently, it announced Google +1, an application that acted as the equivalent of the Facebook “Like” for search results.

But perhaps the most apposite example of social web integration is the kind slowly being added to Google News. This is the search vertical that people often turn to for aggregation and current news (in fact, unless otherwise specified, most searches turn up articles less than a month old), so it’s not difficult to understand why Google would want to use it to tap into the immediacy of social media. Other algorithm-based aggregation sites have already developed similar measures. For instance, Techmeme announced earlier this year that it would begin publishing tweets as headlines. “It seemed as if something was missing in passing over tweets,” wrote Techmeme’s Gabe Rivera. “We’d miss the first few minutes of certain developing stories as well as opportunities for including good commentary. We also missed the chance to let certain sources simply speak under their own byline.” Google’s Matt Cutts suggested recently that publishers should tweet links to their articles immediately in order to get them indexed more quickly within the search engine. Read the article