Google Launches SearchWiki

Today Google launched SearchWiki, the biggest update to their search engine in over year (that we know about). As of today if you log into your Google account and then do a search, you can delete the search results you do not like, promote the ones you do like to the top of the listing and comment on them.

The changes will only apply to your account and not the results of other users however this is part of Googles plan to take the emphasis off rankings and more on content.

A step in the right direction, if we start promoting our favourite sites and all have personalised results then the classic SEO techniques will no longer matter and company's will be forced to write valuable content!

Novelty? Move for the better? Or a way to push paid advertising?

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Nov21

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  1. ike's Gravatar # Posted By ike
    21/11/08 18:57

    Nice! I do kind of wonder how much buy in it will get in the general population... It would need to get a lot of buy-in, like at least 30% for it to really have any affect at all on the companies producing the content. Hopefully that will happen. :)

  1. Daniel Sellers's Gravatar # Posted By Daniel Sellers
    21/11/08 19:29

    Part of me wonders if this won't play a role in pageRank at a later date... Make sense as people will be a more accurate judge of whether content is actually useful or not. Its hard to fool someone who is actually looking for information...

    Not sure what the plans are but if I was google and enough people used it... combined with exiting pageRank model could be an interesting and useful tool for ranking cites and content.

  1. Glyn Jackson's Gravatar # Posted By Glyn Jackson
    21/11/08 19:48

    In one way this is a good thing, but call me sceptical, Google is going to get a huge amount of data from this. Pagerank is just another way Google could figure out which sites people were voting for and this is no different, it may even be a replacement in some respects to Page Rank, mark my words ;)

  1. Glyn Jackson's Gravatar # Posted By Glyn Jackson
    21/11/08 20:33

    One thing I have just noticed is that you can make your comments public and can view all other users comments by clicking "see all notes for this SearchWiki". A big concern! How is Google planing to "police" competitors from leaving disparaging remarks!!!!

  1. ike's Gravatar # Posted By ike
    21/11/08 22:25

    I don't know that google will really need to police disparaging comments from competitors in particular... however... I would be surprised if this data becomes part of their general algorithm for search results because that would open their search algorithm to direct tampering from bots who sign up with random names and vote up a random assortment of their own urls. Right now they've got some semblance of control on google bombing / spamdexing ... adding any data from this new wiki into their algorithm would basically destroy what control they may have on it currently.

  1. Glyn Jackson's Gravatar # Posted By Glyn Jackson
    22/11/08 12:29

    I agree, I don't think users will directly affect the algorithms but the data from this could go along way to weeding out bad sites depending how its used by Google. We already know Goolge does uses search/user habits in some way.

  1. Daniel Selles's Gravatar # Posted By Daniel Selles
    24/11/08 02:38

    I understand the possibility for corruption that this could present but it would be a simple thing to look for abusive patterns and disable that users ability to affect ranking... Just saying that if monitored this could give them a very powerful tool in identifying what people are really looking for when the search.

    Think about how Big Blue won those chess matches... he/it was able to draw on an enormous wealth of past matches to see patterns for players in general and the player he was playing in specific. This allowed him to better evaluate and weight the possible options he was computing and the reaction each would result in. If you want things to be "intelligent" the only way is by letting them gain "experience." This has the potential to allow google to gain input from subjective beings that pageRank can't fully take into account.

    Don't know if this is what they are thinking... but I have been thinking about this for a project I am working on quite a bit.

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