Google SearchWiki is alive! If you’re logged in to your Google account, you can promote search results to be higher on the page, or remove items you don’t want to see in search. You can also leave notes and choose to share those notes with other users of the service.
This gives us lots of interesting things to think about:
- Customising your experience with SearchWiki is not going to affect others’ searches… yet. But that doesn’t mean that Google wouldn’t use that later to help augment others’ experiences. When you view the comments on a given search you can already see how many people promoted or demoted a given result.
- Can Google start making intelligent decisions on later searches based on what you thought of things previously? If I were to demote all the Wikipedia results on my results page, will they eventually stop appearing for me at all?
- A Google-implemented crowdsourced search has the potential to crap all over sites like Squidoo or or Mahalo from a great height. It will be interesting to see how these services react, if at all.
- Users can leave notes on a search for others to see. Users can also see how many people promoted or demoted a particular result. That sounds to me like something that could be abused for spamminess. How long will it take for loads of completely illegitimate positive notes turn up on results from crappy splogs?
- Even without spam, will these notes just become a firehose of unmitigated crap, Yahoo Answers-style? Does anyone moderate these comments? How do valuable comments get promoted over ‘lol first post’? (This is an obvious way little crowdsourcer types can differentiate—just be less crap)
It’ll be interesting to watch this develop, anyway.
