I’m sure a lot of you have already read about Google’s launch of SearchWiki last week. Indeed many of you with Gmail or Google Accounts will have actually had a chance to play around with it yourself. It’s not the first Search Engine to do this, WikiaSearch has been doing it for a year or so now… but Google launching this kind of change is quite a big event… that sparked a lot of blogging on the ether.
There are 3 options presented with each Search Result:
- A function that allows you to push a result up the rankings…
- A function that allows you to add comments about the result…
- A function to remove the result from the rankings altogether…
… and 3 options presented at the bottom of the Search Results page:
- Add your own result for searches on that keyword…
- See all your own comments (presumably to be used as a bookmarking or tagging function)
- See all comments (added by anyone) for a particular search from
Here’s a clip on how you can use it:
As a user, I’m not quite sure what to think of it. On the one hand, it lends a social and interactive element to the standard Google results page… for common searches that I run, I might be tempted to order the results as I want or add comments to tag the results in a specific way.
On the other hand, the beauty of Google for me was that I could do a quick search and move on, I don’t feel comfortable using it and adjusting the rankings…. and for bookmarking and tagging well I use del.icio.us for that. If I run a particular search very often… I usually end up bookmarking the sites that I need to get to (or memorize them).
From an online marketing perspective I think this added functionality is likely to taint the quality of Google’s Search Engine results. I’m assuming that Google has launched this to see what kind of interaction, comments or ranking changes are fed through. It will be dangerous when they start using this information to tamper with the rankings… as inevitably it will be manipulated by black-hat SEO guys trying to push their sites and pages.
I’m not sure how long it’ll be up for… or when Google will start using the data in their ranking algorithms. If they did would we ever know? Will they think about applying this do AdWords? After all, it seems to me that allowing consumers to ‘rate’ (with a thumbs up or down) might work better in the calculation of AdWords Quality Score… rather than on organic listings.
You can read more about it here and some negative musings about it from TechCrunch here .. which also provides a link to some instructions on how to switch it off … using a Firefox Greasemonkey script… .
Definitely, interesting developments… and am interested to know what you all think…? I’m not an SEO expert, so if there are any reading this, I’d be interested in your view points…
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