We’d noticed an increasing number of people emailing on a large-scale bucket test (a product change tested on just a percentage of total users) that Google has been conducting for months – adding a Digg-like voting feature to search results (which also changes the ranking) as well as user comments.
Tonight, Google apparently said “what the hell” and turned it on for everyone.
The changes are called SearchWiki, and are a dramatic departure from Google’s streamlined, algorithm-rules approach to search. It takes features from Digg to allow users to vote site results up or down, as well as features from Wikia Search to allow users to add comments, move search results, add search results, etc. The result are customized results that appear every time you do that search in the future (assuming you are logged in).
Here’s a demo video:
TIme to bet on Google Stock again. Google will last another 100 years.
Google outlasting humans?
It could happen.
If only they were humans!
It was always time to get G Stocks, they are always growing up
Dude …take your spam ass to ur shitty slum in the third world country..useless comments.
I agree that this guy posts a lot of useless comments. So do the Locator guy and the Yasser guy (Oh btw, Check out blah blah). But at least those guys aren’t posting comments that are useless AND racist (Hint hint)
Thats true mate!
Someone clarify this for me if you can -
You are searching for bike trails in bay area, then come upon a link that you love so much and think that it should be #1, so you decide to move it to #1 —> but if you already know a fantastic site for bike trails, why the phuck are you searching for bike trails??
Essentially, you can rearrange search results, but only for yourself – which means they will help YOU, but only if you keep searching for the same thing over and over again!
What kind of dumbass would keep searching for the same thing over and over again?
Exactly!
Comment by: SW, 4:53pm
“COMMENTS??? FAP FAP FAP”
Aaaaand it begins…
Comments….Not Good.
I see potential for a lot of lawsuits because of the comment feature. Companies will start dropping nasty comments on their competitors. If you are the owner of the domain, you should be able to moderate the comments, if not , it is going to get pretty nasty.
Hmm, interesting. I do not see everyone’s comments anymore. Can anyone see it ?
First. d’oh!
Isn’t turned on over here yet :\
Same here !
It was off one second and on the next for me. I assume that the promotions and demotions only affect my individual search results? I hope they implement something like this for Google News.
Yeah, I’m still waiting for the new hottness myself.
“‘what the hell’ and turned it on for everyone.”
Not for me!
Correction: Ffox, yes. Safari, no.
Ah, interesting, yea Safari user here..
Not even playing with the fox for me
It’s not on here in Denmark either.
We already know that ratings can be manipulated (there was a guest writer on TC who posted a long article on this). Is Google sure this will be an exception?
I guess this voting feature is a huge opportunity for those who know how to inflate ratings on sites with voting features. Big money for a very small group of people
Google knows who everyone is, they can 100% for sure prevent any attempt at tricking the voting system.
How do they know? They got Google accounts activity history over a period of years and months. They know if the behaviour is human or robotic, that is a very basic detection mechanism. You can’t built a robot that will trick a bunch of Google accounts for months and years just for the purpose of inflating certain online ratings. Impossible.
Also Google has users ID in many cases, in the form of verified unique ID in credit cards on file for users who have used Google Checkout or other verifiable e-commerce partners of Google, it could simply be Google can verify peoples real identity in partnership with Amazon, Ebay and others.
Google also has millions of verified ID of Google accounts that uses Google services such as Adwords, Adsense, Google Apps, Youtube partners and more like that. Those are already millions of Google Accounts which Google can with 100% certainty know that the people are real, thus from that, it gets all that much harder for people to trick votes.
Google simply will weight verified Google accounts more then unverified or newly created Google accounts, all using clever algorithms.
People could just use a botnet to hijack one of those verified accounts with a long history.
They’d need online banking style security to make a more perfect system, but who’d bother with that just to leave a comment or vote?
i dont see the incentive to customize text based google results. are your personal googl results that important? maybe if your studying in college with time to waste but not for savvy business people and consumers. business people and users dont have time to organize googles garbled 1999 era text based garbled search results. i know there is an easier way.
OneLocator.com – simplicity rules
“simplicity rules”
Great advice. Why don’t you practice what you preach and get simpler domain names?
when it comes to search or the strategic positioning of content, products, services or users on the internet…. “natural language location” is as simple as it gets.
one good name is all i need but why not create and dominate the greatest strategic natural language location engine network ever. i dont think anyone wants to go against my “potential” arsenal of custom niche offerings for consumers and businesses.
LanguageLocator.com – speak easy
So that’s what that is. Thought it was a toolbar of mine doing that without being active. Noticed it a little while ago on a search.
But this means that Google Preview doesn’t work for the millions of people that have Firefox that use it. I’m working on a workaround for this. Is anybody else having this problem?
Doooooope. Why didn’t I think of that?
Just got turned on for me tonight.
I have to say that the initial implementation totally confused me and I’m probably in the 10% of US population that actually knows what WIKI is. Not a very strong release in my view.
For a minute I thought I wasn’t on Google but on a Phising site or some Firefox add-on going crazy on me…
This is going to confuse the hell out of ordinary non-techies. I hope they only turned it on for users who they believe are early adopters of search tech.
Interesting to see what measures if any they’ve put in place tor prevent gaming this voting system. I’ll guess we’ll see…
Not turned on in Firefox 3.1…
LOL. i like yahoo better.
Anybody wanna take bets and see how long before this gets removed?
Uhhhm
24 – 30 hours MAX
Best,
Mike
http://www.wannadevelop.com/
I understand that the changes in the rank will only affect YOUR rankings for a keyword. Only comments will be available for everyone.
But obviously google will give this information some value in the algorithm (sorry for my bad english).
Yup I agree. For sure Google will use this information in their algorithms.
Eventually the best comments may also be used to describe the links instead of using page description and instead of taking some text from the page.
Good to see Google innovating the search. Although this concept is going to be a double edged sword for SEO experts.
Anybody who has sites that get a lot of free and organic search engine traffic from Google should check their webstats… I see big changes started November 20, which was yesterday
One of my site just spiked up like crazy while some have dropped off a bit sharply
Weird
I’m in China and I’m not seeing any difference, even on the English version.
The Youtube Video Downloader of TechCrunch is not working. But Mazic is here to ease the life of netizens. Just try http://mazic.in...downloader.html
Does this mean the google algo has lost to humans?
I think that the Google algorithm has always been based on analysing human activity more than anything else such as counting referal links and only computerized pagerank stuff like that.
The Google Toolbar probably gives Google pretty good info on what sites people are interested in and find useful. Google knows which links in search results that people click on, they know how long time people spend on search result sites. They may even get more information from the Google Chrome browser. All that to provide better search results.
Works in Australia, but one has to be logged in.
It’s the worst idea ever, but it may help Yahoo.
Google just ran out of ideas. They made the mistake not to acquire Digg and from a search innovator they turned into a lame copycat.
So, the Indian guys that used to sell backlinks at $0.10 a piece will now start charging for per vote. SEO will become much simpler though.
Vote spam is impossible. SEO doesn’t work.
There is only content optimization and making your products and services more relevant to get you a higher search ranking.
as far as i can tell, there’s no way to turn it off once you’ve opted in.
Where do you opt in?
Could you post some videos of your experience with it?
I didn’t get a chance to try this feature
Did they disable it, or is it just me?
Anyway, I do think you should have the option to see search results just as everyone else would(without any changes), in case you want to see where you appear in the search for a certain search phrase.
Can’t wait for a semantic web search approach from the G guys.
Err…Mike. You just sign out. Not that hard.
Remember folk what the video says: “You only see your own changes.” All they want is getting more people to log into their Google accounts, so they can collect even more data on them. That way they will create a complete profile of your likes and dislikes. Thanks a lot Big Brother!
“dramatic departure from Google’s streamlined, algorithm-rules approach to search”
… no, you can’t manipulate Google’s results, ranking is still based on Google’s algorythms, because:
“The changes you make only affect your own searches.”
Just another distracting info-time-wasting piece of useless fluff from the Big G if you ask me. It has the potential to be used for all the wrong reasons and might be one the first apps they remove….watch this space!
TFD
Why the hell SEO will be affected, all comments will be personallize and will not affect other users
Wrong, Comments will effect the reputation of the company. It may not effect the ranking but imagine competitors dropping negative comments on other companies and other return the favor by doing the same to everyone. It will make comments irrelevant. Especially when comments can be seen by everyone, this would have a very negative impact on Google search.
PS. Who wants to have ‘x’ thousand comments attached to their website anyway??? I really don’t want to waste a heap of time stating the obvious. Can’t you see that it’s just going to be more info overload!! What’s more is the fact that it’s been launched soooo quickly. Is this the G’s future strategy? Get an app out after 50 think it’s cool then get ‘us’ to test it and see what sticks? Seriously Serge and Larry. Are you guys listening? In fact, I’m begining to wonder if either of you are aware of all the ‘G things’ that exist out there with your name attached.
TFD
This is going to be really really valuable for Google, and not that valuable for the rest of us. They’ve just gotten a lot more information about our likes and dislikes, and can serve you even more relevant ads.
What I don’t understand is why does Google need:
1) Google Bookmarks
2) Google Notebooks
3) SearchWiki
SearchWiki serves just about the same function as the other two, as you’re the only person who sees your rankings. Still scratching my head on where it’s useful for us, with the exception of a butt-load of more clutter on search results.
I think they are getting desperate. They lost over 60% value in ONE year and nobody knows when it ends. This was something they had in mind for a while but never thought to come out any time soon, but times change and Google might be in the same spot as Yahoo! is now in 1 year! Think about it. They still ONLY have search which is doing good, all other products are loosing money and in times like these, you HAVE to make money!
However, the way they introduced this feature is just BAD and might be gone again soon….and with it another couple of Billions in value!
They have plenty of other products that are not loosing money, they are just not making as much huge amounts of money as search does for them.
They aren’t loosing money on Youtube for example, they are just not making as much money yet as they should with it.
Once I find something I might want to revisit, I bookmark it I won’t be searching for it again.
If this system doesn’t help other people find really useful websites by using the ratings people take the trouble to assign, well it’s no better than bookmarks with comments.
If they take out the public comments then I think it will be fine. I don’t care about what Google knows about my likes and dislikes, I want services tailored to me and with Amazon, Netflix, Google and others this has been the norm for quite some time. With public comments, I think they are asking for trouble.
How does this thing work? So only I can see my comments?
I like the idea… maybe they should make it more social… like a “Social Search”
I don’t see it though!
Oh btw
Check out http://www.jobstaxi.com
New Jobs. CauseForce. Strands. Carbine Studios. NCsoft.
A really interesting move by Google… good to see that more power is being handed over to the users. Not sure how companies that have spent thousands upon thousands fully optimising their sites to top-rank will feel given that users can just move their link down the page? As for the user comments – they definitely need to go – well all know that web anonymity hardly brings out the best in people
Top comments are probably not going to be by anonymously recently created Google account users. If you click the feature to see other people’s comments, only the most relevant and best rated comments will show at the top.
Google is always striving to increase user experience. Not showing up in my browser yet. Loads of questions boggling in my mind. I’m very intrigued about this new feature. Time to do some research.
Apparently Japan is not part of “everyone” either, cuz it ain’t on over here either.
I’d agree with the comment above that this is a double edged sword for seo’s. It basically means someone can alter their search result ordering (if they can vote up/down). That means that what the SEM sees may not be what the user sees so how the hell are you to know what position your page ranks in??
A good thing really as it will force people to improve content and stop practicing dodgy seo tactics!
another possible change – search right from the map: http://geo.linkstore.ru
Seems like it will be removed next year
It was working this morning when using http://google.com/ncr. Still not working in Spain either.
In Google SearchWiki, nobody knows you’re a /b/tard… Sits back and opens popcorn.
“(which also changes the ranking)”
You are clearly wrong here. That is NOT a sensible impression to give readers
I’m all for the Searchwiki functionality (customize search results for any search query by moving results up or down according to their relevance) – However, I am a little concerned by the Public comments system as I am sure this will be abused in some way shape or form. I have just checked the first comments left for Amazon and sure enough the first comment is someone advertising their compeating website and then there is another comment “First one to suck!” which is hardly useful in anyway shape or form. The guys at Google must have considered the Abuse factor???
I had it yesterday, but now it’s gone. Did they disable it?
Arrington!
Provide the same thing so we all can turn of that Locater asshole.
@hiyw
learn how to spell and articulate your intentions.
CharacterLocator.com – its earned
have a great weekend everybody.
So from what I understand, the search results changed will only be for myself? What use is that really? When I search for something do I have time to edit my personalized results for myself on a specific key word that I may not search for again? Google does a great job already, and I have bookmarks for one’s I like.
I do agree they are going to use the result to sharpen their organic listings, perhaps use it as part of the algorithm. May be they are using this to gather data for now then turn it off once they learn what they need to know?
In the last Techcrunch50 I believe the rep from Google said that 90% of search has been accomplished, and that the last 10% was to be done by humans? Perhaps this is a piece of that?
It does make sense, computer managed search can never on it’s own be 100% intuitive. This might just help make up the last 10%.
From what i have seen, Google is brilliant in everything they do and you can’t rest, this is just another piece of the puzzle to keep them ahead.
Well Its Sat 22 here in Australia and i have just tried logged in to Australia google and then US Google with Chrome, Firefox and IE its not there for me
* I still am not able to use SearchWiki on my primary account created 2-3 years ago.
* I created an account for a separate account 3 months ago and that has SearchWiki
* I just created a test account 5 minutes ago without “Web HIstory” enabled and I do not get SearchWiki.
* Created a second test account with “Web History” enabled and it does not work on that account either.
Bastards stole my every idea. And I knew they would – because I really *am* that good. I’m tempted to bring my personal blog back from the dead just to prove it…I wrote about every idea they’re using on SearchWiki now a few months ago. I even did screen shots of the HTML I rewrote to make it work. And they … if I sue, can I finally get paid for this? *undeleting blog as I write this to point to correct post*
Ah, here we go:
http://marahmar...+search+engines
I don’t work for free, so this could get very messy.
This is silly for the same reason software patents are silly. Independent discovery is commonplace in the software world, and I’m certain there have been many things like this long before you wrote that post.
I cant see it,too