Google introduces SearchWiki; SEO heads explode
If you’re signed in to Google this morning and have performed a search, you’ve no doubt noticed that they’ve introduced interaction elements that allow you to move results up or down or suppress them from your display. Google is calling this feature SearchWiki. According to the Google Help Center article on SearchWiki, your modified results persist whenever you are signed in to Google and search for those same terms.
Naturally, this feature has implications for both search engine optimization and user experience. Having been on both sides of search: designing the search itself, and optimizing content for display in result sets, I can certainly see user advantages to this feature. Plenty of users have adopted the behavior of using Google as a launcher of sorts, so allowing those users to customize their search results for individual effectiveness entrenches Google even more firmly within those users’ web workflow. This is smart.
What I’ve always struggled with on the search design side, though, is that the more freedom users have to tailor their search experiences, the harder it becomes to present fresh relevant content to them. How Google will integrate new content into the personalized result set remains to be seen, but there must be allowance for it.
On the SEO side, optimizing content for display in search engine results has tended to be thought of in terms of anticipating the behavior of the algorithm first, and then trying to anticipate the behavior of the user. With this change, the user experience becomes more prominent, and the SEO must think harder about motivating the user not only to determine content relevant enough to click, but now the goal is to motivate the user to rank the content higher in a given result set. Ultimately, this bodes well for the user.
What are your thoughts on SearchWiki? Share them in the comments.
Filed under: Commentary, Google, SEO, Search Engines, Usability
Kate is correct. You must be logged in to get the new features. This is an interesting move for google. What effect will actions by users logged in and upping/downing a SERP have on that SERP for the rest of the world? Oh, and Michael Harrington at TechCrunch does not seem pleased about the new changes and the fact that the user can not turn the features off.
I have yet to see this feature for any search I have done this morning. Do you know if this is being rolled out one DC at a time?
Paul, I don’t know for sure – I was logged in to Gmail and when I performed a search, I saw the features. I added a screen capture excerpt to this post, so you can see what it looks like, even if you can’t see it in action.
If they do allow us to influence live search ranking I think more weight will passed onto trusted Google account owners who have been registered for years and have a good Google footprint. Those who have just signed up will have little or no influence on the rankings in live search, it just wouldn’t make sense
For years Google has been busting a gut for all of us, so isn’t it time we started to help them?
It may never happen as this is still an experiment. Google are playing around with the data to see if they can justify user voting. My guess it’s going to take a long time to get right. But Google has good logic and tools when it comes to defending spam so maybe it may be implemented quicker. Who knows?
[...] Google introduced SearchWiki functionality more than half a year ago there was a big uproar. Afterwards SearchWiki has been [...]