Have you noticed that you have some strange icons if you search in Google when logged into your Google account? Now you can promote, demote or delete search results in Google and even add results to the search. This is called the Search Wiki. Perhaps a glimpse of the future at Google with personalized searching.
The extra button appear as shown here. The up arrow button allows you to move a search result closer to the top while the X button allows you to delete a search result.
The bubble button allows you to make a note about that search result.
This note can be made public and will be shared with other users logged into their accounts through the “See all notes for this SearchWiki” link at the bottom of the search page as seen below:
At the bottom left side, you can see that you can also add a result to your search.
According to the official Google Blog:
“The changes you make only affect your own searches. But SearchWiki also is a great way to share your insights with other searchers. You can see how the community has collectively edited the search results by clicking on the “See all notes for this SearchWiki” link.”
These changes are stored associated with your Google account and will be accessible when you search after logging back into your Google account. If you log out, these will not be available.
Already people are speculating that these data will be used by Google in the future to influence search engine ranking. Somehow I doubt Google will submit to mob rule and it is so obvious how it could be abused. Having said that, perhaps it will be yet one more factor influencing page rank in the future.
Perhaps the more immediate abuse will be making comments on other people’s websites and making them public. Also I wonder if links can be included in the comment field because then comment spam could become rife.
When you do try to add a note, a warning box does come up that lets you know that your comment will be associated with your Google user name. That probably won’t deter the hardcore though.
Good or bad? What do you think?
You can find more at the Official Google Blog
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
I hate the fact that there’s no easy “reset” button.
No kidding. Also I would like to make private notes and not be forced to make my notes public. I suspect if people find it annoying, they will log out of their account before searching.
Too early to tell but something is in the works.
Might be similar to the “similar pages” results. How do they come up with those anyway?
Hi Rob. I have been using Google Suggest since it was a baby in Google labs and love it.
From Google Suggest FAQ:
That’s pretty cool. How does it do that?
Our algorithms use a wide range of information to predict the queries users are most likely to want to see. For example, Google Suggest uses data about the overall popularity of various searches to help rank the refinements it offers.
The second you mentioned this, abusing it immediately came to mind. It’s good to hear Google is currently only using it to affect our own searches and I sincerely hope it stays that way.. All too often #1 and #2 results are direct competitors and it’s going to get silly in a hurry if we start seeing people posting on webmaster forums offering incentives for people to “Up” and “X” other people’s posts.
Hello, I have added one site at “Add a result” in google.com, now I want to delete this result from my account. How can I do this.
Please help me.
Hi Anant,
I assume this is a legitimate question. The answer is actually in my post and in the link to the Google blog. You click the X button beside the result you wish to delete. Make sure you are logged into your Google account otherwise it will not appear.
I am login in my google account but i am not able to find X button, I have found only up arrow button besides my result.
I just checked logging into my account and the behavior has changed since I wrote this. When you add a search result and then you want to get rid of it, you need to use the down arrow (restore). The result should then appear on the bottom of the page and the X button is now visible. Click that to delete it.
Thanks for pointing this out
Thanks Barry, for your suggestion. My problem is solved