I may be in the minority here, but the focus on social search seems like a red herring. Kudos to the search team for trying things to see what works, but this

I may be in the minority here, but the focus on social search seems like a red herring. Kudos to the search team for trying things to see what works, but this feels awkward to me. The implementation gives me a "hotel california" feeling -- that your social relationships follow you where you go, no matter what you're doing. Heck, it's much easier to be anonymous offline than online nowadays. This really feels like it's trying to be all things to all people. The search results page is starting to look like salad. What used to be simple and streamlined is now jumbled together. It honestly looks like an implementation that server-side developers would create as a response to competition from Facebook and Bing. Seriously, the SERP is on a path to jump-the-shark territory. I made the leap to DuckDuckGo and have basically quit Google (save for my legacy email.) As I said, I may be in the minority here, but this just feels like a slow crawl toward mediocrity.