On October 26^th, Google rolled out the first release of its new Social Search, which pulls results from content posted on the Net by your most trusted sources, your friends.

It is still an experiment. To activate the social search feature, users have to opt-in and create a Google Profile with the list of their social networks. Google will do the rest, by indexing their social graph and applying its search algorithms to match the queries with the content posted by the users’ friends. The user becomes the link to what he posts.

It is a game changing move in the search space, the dawn of a paradigm shift in the way information and products are found and promote themselves in the digital space. When the curation of content becomes human, influencing the ranking is no longer a matter of bids on a keyword or SEO tricks. You can pay as much as you want, but if your unhappy customers happen to be my friends or if your competitor’s happy customers belong to my circle, you can shout as you want, but I’m not listening.

But, what about Google? Isn’t it afraid that, with search being distributed throughout your social circle, AdWords will start to rapidly lose that 25% of search volumes, that is still its main source of revenues?

So far, sponsored ads have blended with organic search results in an almost symbiotic way. So much so, that in the age of rich media, the most effective format is still a simple text ad.

• What happens though, when users start looking for a recognized name or face within the search result? Will sponsored ads click-throughs decline?
• How is Google preparing itself to counter this revenue shortcoming? What new formats should we expect? How do you make an ad resemble a friend?
• How will targeting evolve? Are keywords still going to be the most effective way to measure our purchasing intentions? Or shall we expect behavorial targeting to finally take off, as the spider keeps crawling what we post and share?
• How will sentiment analysis play a role in this, when my content and my friends’ content becomes spiderable? Will Google show results only from companies that I am most likely to click? What if most of my friends have criticized company X? Would it still make sense to show that sponsored ad?

It will take time for sure for all the changes to happen. Google profiles are still a niche thing for a few geeks. But once time comes, are we all going to become Google “AdFriends”?