Welcome to the Semantic Web: Google Experiments with Voting

The Web 2.0 blogs are abuzz with a Google Labs experiment that no actual person seems to have gotten their hands on yet: a voting mechanism for Google search results. It's been called Digg-styled while others think it's just a way to personalize results.

I don't think it's either one. I think Google realizes that if people didn't want more relevant results, Mahalo would have sunk like a stone already, and that isn't the case. While I've had disagreements with friends and colleagues about the infallibility of the Google algorithm machine, most folks are still of the mind set that Google doesn't need to fix what ain't broke.

The problem is, Google certainly is broken, and the recent web-based campaign to use Google search results as malware booby traps shows exactly how broken it is. Search results can still be gamed with something as simple as blog comment spam; the gaming of the system for the malware sites was done using hundreds of domains, most registered within a few days of the exploit being discovered.

There is one major component missing from the algorithm approach to search results: the human one. Web 2.0 companies like Mahalo and StumbleUpon are succeeding for a reason; we still care what other people think and recommend. Imagine if Google, who has probably the most powerful algorithm in the online search sector, were to leverage the opinions of their millions of users on how relevant those results really were.

I've seen confusion in the comments sections of other blogs about this "experiment." A simple review of how Google has succeeded provides what seems like a pretty clear road map to me: release something to a select few users (I have asked EVERYONE I know to check Google Labs under their log-in… NO ONE has actually seen this experiment other than the page with screenshots from Google), making it the most desirable Google Experiment since Gmail. Once it does show up, every early adopter tech weenie (like me) is going to jump on that bandwagon and start rating just to see what it does. Even with a million users over a day or two of searches, imagine the amount of information Google could amass, and we know they don't do anything without a big fat database sucking it all in.

Google really wants to provide the best results; at its core, ads and search are still the backbone of the company. And with the amount of data they mine regularly, imagine how voting could add to parsing the data they are tossing back at you in a search results page. If you regularly are looking up programming links, they can sift through to find other folks looking up programming links and when you look up "gift ideas" you may get ThinkGeek as your top result instead of something like "Crocheted Turkey Hats, Etc."

It's pure genius, as is their "gotta have it" limited-release viral marketing technique. And I don't even mind if it keeps me from having to move past the second page of results to avoid ancient pages and blogs proliferated with comment spam.