Google search functions are getting increasingly social. This month, Google added image searches to its Social Search experiment, allowing for ever more personal searches. Soon, your image search results will include related images and web content from your friends and online contacts.

For instance, say you’re thinking of getting a dog. You’ve got a small apartment, so you want a small dog. You do a Google search for “small dog breeds” and Google turns up all the usual, expected results, including articles by pet experts, pet stores, dog trainers and the like. However, you’ll also find images and web content posted by your friends. If a friend of yours has written an article or blogged about Chihuahuas, that article or blog page will appear under a special heading called “Results from your Social Circle.”

Now that Social Search has been added to Google Images, you’ll see results there as well. For instance, if a photographer friend of yours has posted photos he’s taken of a client’s Pomeranians on his professional website or a neighbor has posted pictures of her miniature dachshunds on her Facebook page or on a web photo sharing site such as Flickr or Picasa Web Albums, these images will appear under the “Results from you Social Circle” heading as well.

The screenshot of images also will include links titled “My Social Circle” and “My Social Content.” Click and you’ll be taken to one of two new Google interfaces. Clicking on “My Social Circle” shows your extended network of social contacts. “My Social Content” takes you to a list of your public pages that may appear in your friends and contacts’ social results.

Thus far, Goggle’s Social Search functions are available to everyone in beta on google.com. Social Search for images and the two new interfaces launched only recently, so it may take several days for your connections and content to update. Currently, they’re available in English only to all signed-in users.

Google this week launched three new enhancements to its search results: hours and menus, informational snippets about events, and highlighted answers to search questions. Each promises to boost your search experience by delivering targeted information in record time.

Of the three new enhancements, the most used likely will be the hour and menu information that pops up in universal searches. Think about every time you’ve searched for a particular store and had to wade through pages of info until you found the page that listed the store’s hours of operation. Now, by entering the store’s name, city and the word “hours,” you’ll get a universal Google search local result with the hours immediately listed. Here’s what we found when we Googled a client using the query “Garcia Institute Jacksonville Beach hours.”

When it comes to restaurants, a website that shows a few photos and gives great verbiage about the chef, the décor and the local jazz band that plays on Friday nights just doesn’t cut it. Even if it’s a restaurant/lounge, the “restaurant” part comes first. And chances are you’re hungry. You want to know what’s on the grill and you want to know now. Take a look at the Google local results we got when we searched “A1A Ale Works St Augustine menu.”

The Rich Snippets function delivers brief annotations that webmasters make summarizing what’s on the page. Rich Snippets for reviews, including restaurant and movie reviews, and people already were in place. Now, we’ve added Rich Snippets for events such as concerts movie show times. Type in an event type and the city and you’ll see a short list of events with snippets of information including dates, locations and links to the official event pages. Of course, much of this depends on webmasters implementing the new markup on their pages. You’ll see this happening more frequently as time passes. Here’s what turned up when we searched “concerts in Jacksonville FL.”

When you type your search in question form, Google’s new answer highlighting function is designed to deliver the most likely simple answer to your fact-based question in boldfaced type within the search results. This function is meant to provide quick answers that are fact based. For instance, “When was the Internet invented” will deliver better results than “Why did Carl Perkins write ‘Blue Suede Shoes,’” and the latter will do better in search results than “What makes a hero.”