SearchWiki

Posted on 24th November 2008 at 9:37 am by Manley

Google has launched human editable social personalised search for logged in users, under the name SearchWiki.

What does this mean for organic search?

Google has launched SearchWiki, which allows Google account holders to adjust their personal search results by moving them around the page, adding new results and deleting inappropriate ones. The user can also add comments about the sites that they are interested in, which can then be read by any logged in user.

These tailored results will appear each time that particular search is performed and, although the customisations only affect the account users results page, they can be shared with other members of the community.

I ran a Google search for our Linkscape™ product and the results looked like this:

The three major points are the little arrows and crosses on the right of each title, and the small quote bubbles at the end of each snippet.

Let's try clicking an arrow. I think that, for the purposes of this experiment, I have noticed that seomoz seem to have chosen to call their similar tool the same name, so I will move its page up a little so that I can keep an eye on it, so I click the arrow to the right of the title:

So, I get a little green arrow to remind me why this page is ranking unnaturally higher than it should. I am also told that I am the first person to pick this result and would also be able to see how many people had promoted or deleted this result, had they done so. The little x has also changed to a down arrow which I click, returning the SERPs to how they were before.

Now I delete the same result by clicking on the little x. I get a rather nice 'puff of smoke' animation and the result simply vanishes. This can then be retrieved at will from the bottom of the page where it is hiding behind some AJAX:

And then I easily restore the result as well. This screenshot also shows the Add a Result option and other SearchWiki links. And that's about it.

The first question that presents itself is why? Why would Google introduce an explicit human element to an algorithm which already uses implicit data collection to personalise the results for all logged in users? The main thrust of Google's business model has been that its algorithm can interpret user behaviour better than those users can themselves and, frankly, there is little to suggest that they were wrong - the Google results are relevant, intelligent and personalised by users' actual behaviour. Why now switch to a more social tagging model?

There are two possibilities here. One is that Google is attempting to incorporate the social buzz into its offering in order to stay in line with current social trends. The Wiki part of SearchWiki might suggest this - any logged in user can share comments and recommendations for any result. Yahoo!'s recent performance and the quality of Google's results suggest that this is unlikely to be a direction in which they are moving. Why allow users to affect relevant results with proactive promotion when they already feed massive amounts of data back through passive search activity?

The second possibility is that Google want this active data. I can only guess at what Google believes that it will offer beyond what its current, passively gleaned implicit data already does. Spam detection, removal of adult sites when safe search is enabled, a reduction in malware sites and a good feel of the social zeitgeist are unlikely to be able to match the power of the data they already have and, as yet, Google has been very reticent in response to questions about the possibility of including SearchWiki in the feedback loop for the main results. We have started a rather simplistic test for this - a page with no links to it at all will be added to a set of SearchWiki personalised results and, if it appears in the main results pages, we will know that Google is looping this data back in.

So this could simply be lip service to the social ideal which still holds that explicit human interaction is more powerful than implicit data gathering, a guard against competition from Wikia (why?) or just adding a rather obscure link to see other’s comments because someone wrote it in their 20% time and it works, but what effect will it have on search?

Firstly it will be a small disaster for search agencies. This week every man and his dog will be playing with their personalised results and, by the time we crawl out of bed on Thursday morning, every CEO on the planet will be calling their search agency in a delighted manner, since their site has jumped 15 positions. Spammers will be hiring huge swathes of students to rank SERPs on specific searches and Google will have a massive amount of data identifying SEOs and the sites which they are promoting.

After a week or so, the reliance of clients on reporting will probably increase, with rank reporting tools become increasingly valuable as internal users artificially inflate their own results. Some users will like the new full-on re-ordering of results. More will discover the, already existing, 'remove irrelevant results' feature. Most will see how personalisation is working for them, where they might not have noticed it before.

In the long term? A few hardened geeks will continue to use the SearchWiki and a lot of people will have permanently inflated opinions of their own positions for certain vanity searches, but the search results are unlikely to be majorly affected. Yes, Google may use our actions to subtly change rankings, but the key word here is subtle. Humans are not the new PageRank and we never should be.

File under: google personalised search

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