A mighty search engine takes a lesson from the brilliant Digg.com
Last week Google launched it’s much anticipated SearchWiki, an iGoogle extra that allows end-users to directly modify search results.
The much acclaimed digg.com utilises an ingeniously simple voting system for it’s user-added content, allowing great content to rise to it’s home page where others can devour it. Now it seems that Google want to know what it’s end-users think of the results it’s serving up too.
SearchWiki, Google’s latest search feature, allows people to log into their iGoogle accounts and manually adjust search results as they see fit. Users can now reorder search results and delete websites from the search results altogether!
A comment bubble icon next to the search listings can be used to add comments to the results that are visible to other searchers. We’ve added a few notes to some of our entries to see how and if they make a difference to the main search results, and we’re keeping a close eye.
The big question for us is whether every day Google users will take to this new idea? Google’s been doing a pretty job of providing good quality results, fast and with minimal effort for the last few years all by itself. Why would we mess with a formular that’s clearly been working for so long. As my grandma used to say, “if it aint broke, don’t fix it”.
The only folks who’s ears have pricked up are those overzealous SEO people who no doubt have already dabbled to spot potential advantages.
But on reflection Google’s step in this direction really does nod toward the two way dialogue that underpins Digg and the importance it is clearly placing in the wider social networking picture. Whether it’ll catch on or not we’re not sure, but it’s direction is clear.
