Wizard's Blog

Image via CrunchBase

A while ago one of Google’s experiments was the ability to adjust the ranking of search results and comment on them.

Today they’ve announced that experiment has been released as a permantent feature called SearchWiki.  You can adjust the ranking, delete, add, and comment on search results.  Your actions are stored in your Google account so they’re persistent (for you), but comments seem to be publically visible.

The first thing that comes to mind (other than that I can finally get rid of Experts Exchange!) is that this could be used to improve everyone’s search results, but Google have explicitly stated that this will not be the case (at least initially).  It does make sense – that kind of data would be very easy to mess with.

Frankly I’m surprised that they’ve made such a radical change across the board.  Don’t get me wrong, I like it, but I would have expected it to be a labs feature or at least optional to protect all the grandmas on dialup from being confused.  It’s a bold move.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Google unveils customised search
• Google Re-Intros Collaborative SearchWiki Feature
• SearchWiki: Google Experiments With Customizable Search Results
• Google SearchWiki Annotate the Web