A private newsletter that I’m subscribed to, that’s created by Eric Ward has shined some light on a very, very interesting topic, concerning my favorite social platform, Google+. To my amazement, a recent Google Patent is providing searchers with the ability to “mute” Google+ search results.

Bill Slawski wrote about it on Webimax, you can go there to read a lot more about this new search feature. This will provide you with the power to simply MUST spammers and other companies, or basically anything you’d like to.

Filtering Social Search Results
Invented by Matthew E. Kulick, Adam D. Bursey, and Maureen Heymans
Assigned to Google
US Patent Application 20130036109
Published February 7, 2013
Filed: August 5, 2011

This specification describes technologies relating to searching. In general, aspects of the subject matter described in this specification can be embodied in methods that include the actions of:

• Receiving a search query from a user of a search service,
• Identifying search results including general search results responsive to the search query and social search results associated with content generated by one or more members of a user social graph associated with the user that are responsive to the search query, the search results corresponding to digital content stored in one or more computer-readable storage media,
• Determining that a first social search result is associated with a first muted member that is a member of the user social graph,
• Generating filtered search results in response to determining that the social search result is associated with the first muted member, and

Providing the filtered search results for display to the user.

Although it’s a small image, the image above shows social signals that might be used in ranking social search results.

Leave your comments below and share this post by clicking the social sharing tabs, just below!