The search for the right candidate just got more personal

The 2012 presidential campaign is about to get a lot more personal, at least if Google has any say in it.

Type in the name of a candidate, the name of a campaign ad, or a debate topic, and soon you’ll be seeing search results from your friends, colleagues and leading online influencers at the top of the page. Instead of clicking on the top-rated result as voted on by the collective intelligence of the Web, you'll be given an opportunity to click on what your in-laws or co-workers have to say about politics. This change to the Google search engine — perhaps the biggest change to Google in the past decade — is all about integrating all of your loose online social connections with the traditional search results of the “public Web.” Just as Facebook realized that the opinions of our friends matter more to us than the opinions of strangers, Google has finally come to the conclusion that what we really want to read about is what our friends and colleagues are reading about.