Wizard's Blog

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So Google SearchWiki has been out for a few days now, and I’ve finally had cause to use it.

In my job I use a programming language called Jade.  It was developed in New Zealand, and they haven’t put much of a push on selling it in the US, so it’s not very well known here.  It’s actually a very good language – strongly Object Oriented, powerful, easy to learn and free to develop in.

Anyway, if you do a Google search for “jade”, you get everything from the type of stone to the Mortal Kombat character.  Even narrowing it to programming related results just gives various Java based toolkits – the Jade I’m looking for is several pages down.

So – perfect opportunity to hit the little up arrow and put the result I want to the top of the list.  It’s not a change many people would want, so in this case limiting my changes to only affecting myself is the right thing to do.  I still haven’t felt the need to write a comment on a search result yet.

I haven’t gotten over my surprise that Google would make a change like this.  Their interface was so simple and clean, and they’ve added a lot of extra stuff to it.  They’re winning the search engine war, so why mess with what works?  There’s even been a pretty strong backlash against SearchWiki in the blogosphere.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the feature, but having it switched on all the time for everyone seems odd.  It only makes sense if they’re planning on collecting a lot of information that’s useful to them.  They’ve already said that they constantly check their results to see whether they are accurate, so I guess this feature gives them even more input on when they need to tweak their algorithm.

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