Google SearchWiki Launched

The end of November saw the introduction of Google’s new SearchWiki service. This is effectively an extension of their personalized search service and allows searchers to customize their results and add or view notes on the listings. It may herald the start of a new phase of adaptable search listings or it may simply be an early reaction to the competitive threat from Wikipedia’s planned search results tool.

If you have a Google account and are logged in when using Google’s search engine, the new SearchWiki service enables you to modify the Google search results to suit your preferences. You can change the order of the search listings, add or delete listings, and add commentary notes against individual results. The changes are stored in your Google account for future reference so it can be a useful time-saving tool if you search for certain topics repeatedly.

As the changes you make only affect your own searches, it isn’t possible to improve your website’s ranking by using this service. You can, for example, move a website into the #1 position for a query, but no one else will see it in that position. However, when you vote to increase a page’s ranking, or make a comment about a URL, the comment, your username and, in some cases, your search query will be shown to other logged-in users. There’s currently no option for private annotation which raises some privacy issues, as people will now be able to see another user’s searching habits and there’s also no opt-out feature for users logged into Google.

Google say that users do have the option not to use the feature (by not logging into their Google account) and that they will watch usage closely through ‘user-happiness metrics’. Initial reaction about the service has been mixed, including negative feedback which has prompted some users to create a script that would disable SearchWiki. There is already a third-party solution which uses a script for Firefox browser users to toggle SearchWiki on and off.

Google has stated that their goal in offering this new service is to ’empower users’ and enables searchers to remember answers to repeat queries. They say that ‘it lets you add your personal touch to our algorithms.’ It is suspected though, that Google’s true motivation is to counter any perceived threat from Wikia Search, and potentially to take advantage of users’ feedback to adjust its overall ranking algorithms.

Google can now amass an even larger dataset of user behaviour, including how particular users rank certain results, what results they don’t find relevant, and even what results should be there that Google’s spider hasn’t yet discovered. If the service becomes used by large numbers of people it means that users would now be performing much of the crawling, indexing, and ranking functions which also makes the system open to abuses.

Google claims that the changes made in the SearchWiki interface will have no impact on the traditional ranking of web pages. However, it’s still a possibility that Google will use the SearchWiki data as a factor for determining organic search rankings in the future. Even Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of search products and user experience, has said “some of these signals might be used to influence algorithms in the future”. The debate around this tool will therefore continue for some time to come but it may mark and important stage in the development of search technology for the future.

If you’d like to know more about Google’s SearchWiki and to see how this works, please contact us for more information.

Leave a Reply