Google SearchWiki Does Not Influence Search Results but Already Manipulated

Last week Google rolled out the SearchWiki functionality for its flagship product - Google Search. The functionality allows every registered Google user to customize the search results for every search query - and get exactly the same results next time this user performs a search for the same term. SearchWiki involves voting links appearing in the search results up and down, deleting them if you feel they are not relevant at all or adding new links that are not present but deserve being there from your point of view. In addition to that, you can also add comments to certain websites that appear in the search results.

And of course since Google offered us the functionality to play with search results as we want and modify them to reflect our personal preferences instead of what Google algorithm delivers, we immediately asked the question about how it will affect Google’s search rankings and positions of individual websites in search engine results pages. Google has assured us that they don’t take human input into consideration for existing algorithm but it is quite obvious that eventually when the volume of data aggregated from users voting on sites and marking them as relevant or not relevant is considerable enough Google will somehow incorporate the human input into its search algorithm anyway. After all, Google rarely introduces new tools for search at all (especially as visible as SearchWiki is) and if 10 thousand people tell you that site A is the best match for the search query B, you will probably have to listen and obey.

My own opinion is that Google will obviously use human input in its search algorithm eventually as human opinions can be much more valuable than the most reliable algorithm - but first Google will make sure that its algorithm can not be manipulated into using the human input that is not natural but is only intended to deceive the system. Only after the search team is 100% sure that no gaming practices could work here, Google will start using our votes to help the algorithm determine actual value of a website and its true position in the search results.

But at the same time I immediately thought about the huge number of people working in internet marketing and how they will react to this new idea of rearranging the search results as you like - exactly something they work on day and night using tons of various techniques to push the sites they promote up in the search results. You know, Google SearchWiki must have looked like a dream coming true to internet marketing guys.

So I somehow guessed that marketing specialists and all types of website owners (and maybe even bloggers) will hardly want to sit back and ignore the opportunity of influencing positions of their sites in search results - even if it could only happen in a distant future. So my guess is that people will still want to receive votes up and favorable comments on their sites, maybe as part of a standard website promotion package they pay for to a specialist working in the field.

But while the current arrangement is told not to influence the positions of websites in the search results, we should not forget that Google has introduced at least some opportunity to increase visibility of a site you promote - the functionality that allows any user to see all the SearchWiki activity for a search term. Basically when you click a link at the bottom of the search engine results page you get to see everything people did using SearchWiki functionality for this particular search term - all their votes, all the added sites as well as all the notes for the sites that appear in the search results.

Obviously, if enough people are interested in checking out what other Google users think of the search results for a term, chances are that your site will get noticed anyway if you vote it up and add a favorable comment. And while this may not sound like a reason good enough to spend your time voting and writing notes for numerous search queries, I have a feeling that people are already heavily engaged in this exactly type of activity.

Out of curiosity I decided to check a few of rather popular search terms when it comes to the tech blogosphere and it now very much looks like people already try to push their sites to the eyeballs of those curious Google users clicking that link for all SearchWiki activity.

First of all, my favorite search for “web 2.0″ showed a few votes up for websites related to Tim O’Reilly (nothing suspicious here, he is an expert in the field so the votes are certainly natural) and Go2Web20, directory of all things web 2.0 from Orli Yakuel (definitely natural) with a vote and a few comments. But there were two sites that did not seem to fit at all: an online CSS editor (hardly relevant at all except for a very web 2.0 styled name) with one vote up and a comment looking very much like left by the site’s owner:

and also a game to chat with a bot taught by people (tell me if it can be relevant):

I have also tried some of the terms that advertisers pay the most for getting their sites visible in the sponsored links area at least. But what could be better than having your website appear in the top of the first page without even paying for it? So I guess SEO people are heavily involved in getting some sites more visibility in the search results for relevant queries.

I decided to see what I would get for “credit card”. As you can imagine, the search produces a Wikipedia entry for “credit card” and another for “credit card fraud”, a couple of YouTube movies about credit cards (one of them about credit card scam as well), results from Google News placed pretty well and only then we see websites that are obviously commercial and are used by their owners to make money (with the help of their good positions in Google results) - first some comparison website and then comes a website CreditCards.com - probably getting massive traffic anyway but not particularly satisfied with their position. Why do I think they are not fully satisfied? Simply because SearchWiki for this query shows that the website has received a total of 4 positive votes and 5 comments as well - also very positive with one exception from a user questioning validity of other comments. What’s more, this particular website received a total of 10 actions from users which is almost half of all 21 actions recorded for “credit card” - quite impressive to be natural, I think.

And the example that brought the highest number of comments and votes from Google users I have found was the search for “Apple”. The number of actions on that query is quite impressive - 649 - and it is rather difficult to notice anything suspicious when the number of people taking part in the process is high enough to compensate any manipulations that must take place somewhere for this query as well.

So after checking these examples I can’t help but think that there are already people trying to manipulate public opinion of their websites by adding positive votes and comments. And Google’s promise that SearchWiki activity will not affect search engine rankings in any way seems not to be enough for people not to hope it will.

At the same time I have to admit that I have not found anything particularly suspicious about “legal services”, for example, - while law-related terms are also pretty expensive for Google AdWords advertisers. My guess is that in the technology-aware crowd of web professionals we already see people trying to manipulate the search results via SearchWiki functionality - if only to get visibility for everyone willing to click that magic link for all activity for a query. Other industries seem to be a little late to the game yet I have a feeling that we will see this changing - and rather soon, at least as soon as they realize that this functionality can help get some people in and maybe will improve search rankings in the future. After all, it is really hard to believe Google has only added all those buttons for us to play with and will never use the aggregated information for its search algorithm.