By David Young
In an apparent effort to challenge Facebook as the market leader in social networking, Google has introduced the "+1" (plus-1) service, which will help the company help build its own social network centered on its lucrative search business.

The service launched yesterday by the internet search giant would allow Google users to connect people to friends using their Google Profile. It will allow them to share their recommendations for websites and online advertisers on search results and Google is optimistic that it will help the company expand the feature to include a person's friends on other social networks.

The service will change the way people use Google's search engine as in the future, the website recommendations of people and their friends are expected to play a role in the ways the results are displayed. "What I like about this is it give you the best of both worlds," Allen Weiner, an analyst for Gartner, said in an interview to Information Week. "It gives you a machine answer and it gives you a human curated answer by adding recommendations from other people."

Facebook already has a similar feature called the "like" button and the button is also there on the Facebook which is clicked by the user to approve a picture, link, or other content on the social networking giant. Facebook currently boasts of roughly a half billion users and is fast growing as a threat to Google's business because the site is used by man y as a way to find products and services through recommendations of others, rather than search engines. "The biggest threat that search faces today is social networks," Weiner said.