A number of posts on one particular webmaster forum (Digital Pointless’ “Google Forum”) alerted me to something I wasn’t aware of - Google’s SearchWiki.
Basically, Google’s Search Wiki allows anybody with a Google account to login, and to vote up/vote down search results, similar to what you see on things such as Digg. These will only be reflected on your results, and (as far as Google are saying) won’t be affecting the other searches.
One thing I would say is I’m unsure how it works. Say if there’s a website (andysbigcars.com), and you search for “big red cars”, it comes 12. You like it, so promote it to #1. Say if you search for “big blue cars”, and naturally andysbigcars.com comes 12 for that phrase too, will it appear at the top? Or only for “big blue cars”?
That aside and personally speaking, I think it’s a great thing, as for too long SEO’ers have been more concerned with getting to the top of search engines, rather than caring what is on your site. Think about it, if say you were ranking second for “cheapest football stickers on the internet”, yet the company ahead of you is more expensive, experienced googlers can promote your site to the top of the listings, remove the #1 result, or even leave a comment saying “they’re not actually the cheapest, these guys are.”.
Of course, with that, comes spamming, so it’ll be interesting to see how the comments are moderated. It’ll be interesting to see if Google release an API for this, so people can put on their website “if you find this site useful, please click here to put us at the top of your search engines for relevant searches.”.
What are your thoughts on it?
on Nov 21st, 2008 at 1:52 pm
[...] Hi everybody Google has recently announced Searchwiki (I talk about it on my blog here), a digg like service whereby you can manipulate your own search results easily and effectively, [...]
on Nov 24th, 2008 at 6:57 pm
I think this is a good usability tool and even it you cannot get your own site to the top of Google you can at least give yourself a nice warm feeling and pretend that you have! Keep up the great work with the DeadSite? Blog, enjoying reading it.
on Nov 25th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
Well if google were to in fact start using these in factoring their results, then companies are going to start to have to make their websites more relevant for the content they are optimizing for.
Another thing that will hopefully go away are those damn directories like yellowbooks, and about.com
One thing that might hurt some smaller companies is the fact that more users might promote a more well known brand to the top of the list for simply knowing it. Leaving a little independent company towards the bottom.
Hopefully google does the right thing and keeps this user specific.