in a recent blog post google ask the question ‘Have you ever wanted to mark up Google search results?’
personally, i can’t say i have and regardless of your desire to, google now gives you the ability via ‘searchwiki’, a technology that’s been rolled out to all google account holders with largely negative media reaction. some bloggers have been quick to criticise the technology’s lack of an ‘opt-out’ preference and the spam that’s already appeared in the results. users can of course simply ignore the new tools if they wish but there’s something about searchwiki and the way it’s been introduced that’s got some people really wound up
searchwiki lets users comment on, re-order, remove or add to their search results. these changes are then then saved and re-appear when the relevant link is returned in a later search. although the re-ordering does not affect standard searches there is the option to see a list of results that others have promoted and commented upon. picture ‘digg’ applied to the google homepage. very much like the social news site, users can also give a thumbs up or down to other people’s comments, while spam, abusive and illegal comments can be reported by users and will be removed by google
current comments add little value to search results
i’d expect to see something like this initially offered via google labs and have it undergo a few rounds of optimisation and feedback before it got anywhere near the google homepage but instead google have gone for the big bang approach. they’re betting this will be big and as product manager, cedric dupont put it
I would call this revolutionary. It’s a huge step, not a baby step in the world of search. This is part of an obvious movement of the web to become more participatory, so Google search is adapting to this movement
it’s not immediately clear what problem google are trying to solve with searchwiki. i’m sure that somewhere in the business plan they are going to mine the user generated data for advertising purposes but initially the move has caused some degree of confusion. perhaps one reason behind the negative reviews is that google search isn’t broken and doesn’t need fixing. it’s one of the few tools people use on a daily basis that doesn’t attract criticism and complaints, it does what it does very well and does it in a simple and elegant fashion. when google hit the mainstream people were crying out for a decent search engine, now-a-days i don’t hear of people crying out for revolutionary changes to google. perhaps the creatives at google are getting bored with tweeking the existing search engine and want something new to do. i’d rather they spent their time finalising their ever expanding list of ‘perpetually in beta’ on-line services or concentrated on improving searching beyond just text, incorporating video and audio searches perhaps (more…)
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