Tweak Your Google Search Results as You Like with SearchWiki
by
on November 20, 2008,
Today Google is finally rolling out its long-promised and long-tested by a large group of randomly-selected users SearchWiki functionality - this time for everyone to see and use. The functionality allows any Google user to customize search results for any search query by moving results up or down according to their relevance (as viewed by this user), deleting certain links from results if deemed not relevant, adding sites that are not in the results pages and also adding notes for various sites - for example, to describe why you think this particular website is helpful for a user doing a search on this query.
The functionality will be available to all signed in Google users and the changes we make will be stored in our Google account histories. Unfortunately there is no opting out available so you will either have to ignore the voting icons if you don’t like SearchWiki or log out to be able to search Google without seeing the icons at all.
But for anyone already thinking that SearchWiki will be a simple way to move a website to the top position for a desirable search query (search engine optimizers come to mind instantly, of course) there’s a big disappointment: while you can move the links up and down all you want, you will be the only person to see the changes in the future when searching for the same keyword.
But at the same time there are still certain opportunity to reach people with your message as every user doing a search for a certain keyword will be able to see changes applied to the results for this keyword by all the other Google users. But of course such visibility of actions and notes will be sure to raise privacy questions as users may leave rather personal notes without realizing such notes are public.
I myself only rarely have to do a repeated search for the same keyword but I can see this functionality being helpful as research has shown that 40% of all searches are duplicate queries they have already made before at least once. So having a customized page of results for an issue you often need to return to may definitely be a good idea.
But of course the issue that is of highest interest to everyone is if Google’s own search algorithm will be influenced by the human input we will provide to the search engine with our votes and notes. And while Google has not expressed any intentions of using this customization of search results to influence rankings of various websites and their positions in search results, it is evident that eventually human input could help Google’s search algorithm understand what users find to be valuable and reliable. And I tend to think that we will see data collected by the SearchWiki functionality integrated into Google’s search algorithm - probably as soon as the team is 100% certain that search engine optimization industry can not influence search results or at least they know how to make suspicious activity identified and ignored.
Here is a video describing the SearchWiki functionality:
