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Google Allows Votes And Comments On Searches

By: Philipp Lenssen
2008-11-21

Google has gone live with a big change to their result pages, at least for those of you who are logged in. Its called SearchWiki, and lets you edit the...

...position of the results youre getting, and add comments to them. SearchWiki was in experimental stage for some time now.

Specifically, youll be seeing three icons accompanying results, and further options below the listing:

  • Up vote: An up arrow, similar in functionality to what you may know from social sites like Reddit or Digg. Clicking it will turn the icon green and move this specific result up one position. Once upped, a down arrow appears as well, which will trigger the result to fly to the bottom of the listing. (At his blog, Ionut Alex. Chitu mentions: -Y-our changes are available only when you repeat the query and, in some cases, for similar queries (e.g.: -google.com- in addition to -google-). That means you cant remove a web page or a domain from all search results.)
  • Remove: An X icon, which will make the result disappear in an animated puff. It wont be completely gone for you, though; at the bottom of the page youll see the note You have removed results from this page with an option to hide them altogether, or restore them.
  • Comment: A Speech Bubble icon which lets you make a comment on the result. The comment will be public, Google disclaims. Once saved, youll still be able to edit or delete your comment later on. Others are now able to upvote your comment or flag it as innapropriate, like on the All SearchWiki notes page. (That page also serves as the next best thing to see the pure vote-based ranking.)
  • Add result: The plus icon is shown below the organic results, and it lets you add any URL at all to your result page.

Now, when you change something, you wont immediately shift around the page for others. For now Google says its a mere customization on your end. (You can see all your customizations in one place at the My SearchWiki notes page.) However, Google indicates in statements provided to Search Engine Land that they wont completely rule out the possibility of this impacting everyones rankings in the future:

I asked what would happen if 10,000 people all added Matt McGees Widget Page to their own results for the phrase -widget-. Were always looking at user data as a signal, -Googles Cedric Dupont- says. And in a situation like that? Were not closing any doors.

Also, once a result was upvoted, youll be seeing who else voted for this result, though it will only show compactly as e.g. -up- 9 -x- 11 - Picked by Rat, Mr, yinan.wu, and others. This may add a more social feeling to search results. (Google calls it a community in their announcement post on this, but we need to keep in mind how diverse this group is, even when they might have stumbled upon the same pages in results.) Note this field wont show your full email address to others, but your nickname, which you can change on your account profile page.

Its probably also not a huge jump to imagine that Google could one day extract keywords from the comments of a particular result to aid them in their results selection for exotic queries. And as opposed to a web index, which at least in theory anyone with enough servers could build, the upvotes, hides and comment data is something Google will exclusively own thanks to their (massive) user base.

Now, all these new features come with a certain amount of clutter, naturally. Ionut in the comments remarks, Google should provide a separate wiki mode (placing a link like edit search results, change the results) that adds voting buttons, commenting options. I guess doing so wouldnt get as many people to participate though " which for Google could decrease the valuable crowd intelligence they may tap with this move.

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About the Author:
Philipp Lenssen from Germany, author of Google Apps Hacks, shares his views & news on the search industry in the daily Google Blogoscoped.


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