Shared articles in the SERP's - who sees these shares?

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Folks,

I am trying to find out a little more about how individuals need to be connected to see that someone 'shared' something and for this to then show up in my results when signed into Google.

Can anyone shed a little more light on this please? I am just looking for extra clarification.

Would we need to be connected through Google Buzz? Facebook? Twitter? Quora? LinkedIn? None of the above? With everyone you are connected to through your Google Account?

What is Google using when it looks at how I am connected with others? This is from their Blog:

"First, social search results will now be mixed throughout your results based on their relevance (in the past they only appeared at the bottom). This means you’ll start seeing more from people like co-workers and friends, with annotations below the results they’ve shared or created. So if you’re thinking about climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro and your colleague Matt has written a blog post about his own experience, then we’ll bump up that post with a note and a picture..."

And...

"Second, we’ve made Social Search more comprehensive by adding notes for links people have shared on Twitter and other sites. In the past, we’d show you results people created and linked through their Google profiles. Now, if someone you’re connected to has publicly shared a link, we may show that link in your results with a clear annotation (which is visible only to you, and only when you’re signed in). For example, if you’re looking for a video of President Obama on “The Daily Show” and your friend Nundu tweeted the video, that result might show up higher in your results and you’ll see a note with a picture of Nundu:"

Many thanks,

Andy

[brycebertola]

You can connect your accounts through your Google Profile (the stepping stone into their social network Google+) and the connections are pulled through those accounts.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Bryce,

As I said above "With everyone you are connected to through your Google Account?"

What I am looking for is a little more info (if anyone has any) on how this works. For example, I am sure that Google isn't going to show every document as shared from everyone in your network because before long, there would be no point in the having normal search results - everything would be a recommendation.

Is Google going to take every person I am connected with and selectively show me random articles? Is it everyone in my connected network?

[brycebertola]

So you wanted to know if they will show all shares and recommendations or just selected shares, etc?

I haven't seen any shares that were "ignored", but of course how could you really tell anyways?

I think if the SEOmoz staff wanted to try an experiment, they could look at the top 10 results for a single term and have a whole network of friends share those pages, then look at the results again and see if all of them have shares.