Google’s efforts to infuse its services with social elements have been relatively lackluster when not being outright stumbles, like the company’s privacy-challenged launch of Buzz last year. Google has a popular social network, Orkut, but that popularity remains confined to Brazil. And the service has been losing ground to Facebook in critical markets like India.

Google hopes to deploy more compelling social offerings this year and its latest effort along these lines demonstrates at least that the company is serious about social connectivity. Google is weaving social into search, its core service.

Google on Thursday said that it has begun mixing social content — friends’ posts to various services like YouTube, Flickr and the like — with its algorithmically determined search results.

So if your friends blog or tweet about their favorite coffee shops, your searches for coffee will return their musings, provided your friends aren’t posing somewhere that Google can’t reach, like past Facebook’s privacy settings.

Previously, social search results were more like the dregs of relevance, settling at the bottom of the search results page were they were less likely to be noticed.

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