I just read on Big Ticket Domains that Google is now letting people edit their own search results if they have a Google account. This new feature is called “Search Wiki” and it allows users “to customize search by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results.” Interestingly enough, users will be able to see comments made by other system users.
Although changes that are made will only effect the search results for that person, it will be interesting to see if they decide to give any weight to this in their algorithm. The power of public opinion is great, and it would be a good way to determine if a website has valuable infomation or not. The problem would be that competitors would have the opportunity to alter results.
The official release can be found on the Google blog.
I bet Google will be tracking sites that get deleted by large numbers of users and will utilize that factor in the algorithem going forward.
It makes sense they’re empowering their users now to assist in the ranking process, since they’re all about user experience and the load of billions of sites in the index database has probably surpassed the ability to effectively sort the good from the spam effectively by just their internal staff and systems.
Will certainly impact crap sites and those artificially manipulated by SEO gurus, but will be great for sites that users really like.
However, you could use it for an ego boost and put all your sites with #1 ranking. 😀
Could end up like digg and be gamed big time…but overall should help sites with great useful content
I suppose the results can be used for evil like trying to get your competition banned or something like that but the way I read this is that this new feature is GREAT for developed sites.
This will kill any spam sites, crap sites.
This could be a “big bang” type moment that might forever alter search engine results AND motivate domainers to develop rather than park or make made-for-adsense sites.
If you have a nice developed site that shows up well in the search results and your competitors in that search result have crappy sites, you should be VERY happy with this announcement.
Look, the good sites that were ranked #11 or #20 for example are still ranked way too low and this latest feature won’t do you much good… and you will not get any benefit from this period… The sites that are crap, well, this can actually help from the user input… Now this also opened a whole new wave of other opportunities for abuse as click fraud rings with 1000s of users/participants existed… Private forums/communities and such… we’ll see how this plays out