The nature of search doesn’t change all at once. It changes incrementally, with different pushes, innovations, and concepts seeing low-scale implementation followed by broader adoption and then eventually becoming the standard for the industry. Social search is on the second stage (increasing adoption), and a recent study from BrightEdge gives us a good picture on how Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter are impacting both search and the web.

What’s social searching? The idea is that by sharing content on a social site, you’re giving it a vote of confidence that effective curates the web and prevents spam results from reaching the top pages. For Microsoft, this is done through a partnership with Facebook that allows “liked” search results to gravitate to the top of the Bing SERP. For Google, a partnership with Twitter and the recently released Google +1 button allow for much the same.

The BrightEdge study examined adoption of Facebook Like buttons, Twitter Tweet buttons, Google +1 buttons, and other social widgets on the home page of the top 10,000 websites, ranked by popularity. Facebook was the dominant player, with 47.4 percent of all sites linking to a Facebook page and 10.8 percent having a Facebook “Like” button on their home page. Twitter, meanwhile, has a standard link on 41.8 percent of the top ranked home pages and a Tweet widget on 2.1 percent of sites. Google +1, meanwhile, has grown by nearly a third in just the last few weeks. In June, 3.5 percent of sites had a +1 button the home page, while 4.5 percent now sport the Google widget.

The Google +1 button is still chugging along nicely, and its adoption is a good sign for both +1 and the Google+ social network. However, Facebook is still the dominant player by a broad margin.