Some Things Google Should Change about SearchWiki to Make It Usable

Recently Google has introduced to the world its latest and biggest change to the way we see search results – SearchWiki. This functionality allows any logged in Google user to vote sites up and down in search results, add notes (or comments) about certain sites and even add the results that are not there yet but should be (according to the opinion of this particular user). These actions are intended to create personalized search experience for this user when he performs the same search next time.

And while it is perfectly understandable that any major change to a product used as heavily as Google Search is, it is still a surprise how heavily Google has been criticized in the blogosphere for the release of SearchWiki given that usually Google fans will not let you criticize anything made by Google – like it was with Google’s browser – Chrome. Yet many bloggers were very loud expressing their dislike of the SearchWiki functionality and they rarely had to deal with negative comments from Google fans either.

But I think it is understandable that after playing with SearchWiki for a few days many of us have come to a few conclusions about the quality of the product and the potential threats to Google users. I myself have mentioned here a few examples of how SearchWiki is already abused by some internet marketers and SEO experts – even though Google clearly stated SearchWiki activities would not influence search rankings for websites at all.

Many bloggers have expressed their unhappiness with Google SearchWiki with the most vocal voice probably belonging to ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick who seems to be mostly concerned about the fact that SearchWiki is not actually any wiki at all and the name should not contain “wiki” because Google’s idea is not about collaborative editing and group thinking. But while he seems to be way too focused on the wiki-not wiki issue around WikiSearch, he has also mentioned that WikiSearch has serious problems with usability.

So I have decided to collect the problems I’ve seen other bloggers mention and those I see myself and publish them here along with some ideas on how certain things could be done better. Hopefully along with your comments below the blogosphere will be able to suggest some ideas for the roadmap to the SearchWiki team in Google for them to be able to turn the product into something we will be actually happy to use.

Let’s begin with what is mostly interesting about SearchWiki. Of course the fascinating part is not in the process of voting sites up and down only, it is in watching what others contributed to the search results, how they ranked the sites, what they added and what they removed as irrelevant. And this is exactly why Google has given us a place to see all such contributions for any search term or search phrase on a dedicated page that you can access by clicking the link “See all notes for this SearchWiki”. And while this is the most interesting part, this link is exactly where the majority of problems with usability are.

First, Google seems not to realize that there may be people using Google for search only and never reading tech blogs or internet-related news in newspapers – hence they may have no idea what the word “SearchWiki” means at all. And what should make a user click a link containing a totally unknown term? Really, putting it in a simpler way for users to understand what they will see could be a good idea. After all, what’s the point in adding certain functionality the majority of users will not even understand?

Second, the word “notes” also hardly describes what you should expect to get by clicking this link. Even if a user really names what he or she writes a note and not a comment (that is achievable), clicking this link will not bring any notes – the user will see the number of votes and the number of comments along with the added or removed sites but not the notes themselves, to see the notes the user will have to click an additional icon. My opinion is that changing the word “notes” into “activity” or some other synonym will at least make it clear what the user will see when clicking the link.

Next problem is that you have no idea what to expect after you click the link with the ugliest situations happening when you click the link only to see there’s nothing to be seen – when no one added anything for that search term yet. And it can easily happen for not particularly popular search terms, of course. A good solution would be to either show this link only when there is something to see already or – better yet – showing the number of votes and notes a user will see for this search term when clicking the link.

Another huge problem is that the two links in the bottom of the page – ‘See all my SearchWiki notes’ and ‘See all notes for this SearchWiki’ – are almost identical when you look at them. And any usability expert will tell you that if there’s one thing you should not make your users try to do (unless you are a blog author, of course) it is reading – everything should be intuitive and putting two identical links will hardly help achieve that SearchWiki is actually used (and hopefully loved) by Google searchers.

And the last point about that all activity link is that for everyone really willing to see what other people did to the search results they received for a query, the link is positioned at a totally wrong place in the very end of the page and moving it up to locate it somewhere in the very top of the search results page could be reasonable if users are actually expected to click that link.

Now let’s move on to other parts of the SearchWiki functionality. The most terrible concern about SearchWiki is privacy, of course. And it is absolutely understandable given that everything you do to the search results is recorded and identified with your Google nickname that some other people will be able to recognize easily. And while you can change your Google nickname all you want and you will even get a warning message when you first start commenting, the fact still remains: no anonymous commenting here.

And it is kind of difficult to understand why Google actually needs to display the nicknames if they only collect the data without any particular purpose – only to let people see what other users think of it, not what some particular users think of it? Why should a user watching a wiki page care about the nicknames of the users that left all those comments if they are not even supposed to know these other users? Ideally, the user should only be interested what other think about the search results, not about who they are. And what if a site owner sees an abusive comment about his site that he can’t even get rid of (remember, no reporting inappropriate content here)? Is not it natural that this site owner will want to trace the person using the nickname? I really would not want people to start hunting for each other everywhere online because of what they say about various search items.

Another major problem with Google SearchWiki is that the comments are not moderated in any way and you can expect all types of inadequate or abusive comments to appear without any filters at all to avoid looking at inappropriate language. Besides, when people add a website to the search results, they can add just about anything without any filters for content either. As a result, you can easily end up with an adult site in the search results wiki for a totally innocent term.

And while I do understand that the huge volume of contributions to SearchWiki pages for all the search terms on Earth makes it impossible to moderate everything, at least relying on collective efforts could help and adding functionality to report comments or added websites would be a good idea that could help prevent situations when SearchWiki is abused by spammers in the most terrible ways. Right now Google does offer the functionality to report an inappropriate comment but the link only appears after you click the thumbs down button for this particular comment. Honestly, I have not figured it out until I read about the functionality on a blog – and I like to think of myself as a user who usually easily figures out easily how to use just about any web product.

And, finally, the worst part about the entire SearchWiki idea is that a Google user can not opt out and the only way to avoid seeing those arrows to vote sites up and down in the search results is by logging out. But unfortunately if you rely on some other Google products you may also have Gmail open in another browser tab or Google Reader or both or whatever other products you use. And what’s the point in logging out every time you want to do a quick search for something on Google? My point is quite simple here: users should be able to choose if they want to participate at all and if these arrows should be here or if this user finds them to be distracting. So why is it impossible to let users opt out of the entire SearchWiki program somewhere in their Google account settings? I have a feeling there’s nothing really impossible about it and so far this is the hugest concern of all users shared in comments on various blog posts.

There are also some minor things about SearchWiki, like the way arrows buttons are located to the right from every search results which makes it rather complicated to click such arrows as they are difficult to find on the page. I have a feeling that putting them discretely to the left from the search result (the way we expect to see voting functionality on Digg or Yahoo Buzz maybe) could be a better option to save users time on locating the buttons on the search results pages. But these things are minor and can probably be easily fixed should Google have the willingness to fix them.

Overall, now that I have completed this post I myself can’t help but ask the obvious question: what has happened to amazing usability engineers in Google that they have rolled our a crucial product in a state that can hardly be described as usable at all. I have a feeling that something must be wrong as such products are definitely not something we expect from Google. Do share your own comments on SearchWiki usability with us if you have any.