Bucket tests and experimental products are one thing. But to mess with the real Google search is serious stuff. Why did they do it?
Google’s overall search share has grown substantially this year (and all other years since it went live). Their share of search advertising dollars is likely even higher.
The changes Google made to search today certainly make it more interactive and social. I can now write comments on search results, and read comments from everyone about TechCrunch (or anything else – see the awesomely useful TechCrunch comments in the image below, along with my votes on each) and vote them up or down. I can move search results around on the page – up, down, or off the page entirely. I can also add other URLs into search results.
In fact. Google paid Wikia Search the highest compliment possible today. They copied most of their features.
So, why did they do it?
In their blog post, Google says they’ve created a way to customize search results, and share (via the comments). They say they are striving to improve the search experience, and giving people tools to make search even more useful to them in their daily lives.
But Google search wasn’t broken. It’s one of the few things on the Internet that isn’t. I love it, as does 62% of everyone on the Internet. This new stuff is a mess of arrows and troll comments and stuff moving around the page. That doesn’t make my search experience more useful. It makes it move to another search engine.
My guess is they’ve made the changes to see what kind of data they get, and how it can be used to make their overall search results better. So when Google says “The changes you make only affect your own searches,” I think they’re only being half-truthful. All this data, in aggregate, will certainly be used to improve Google search results in general.
The worst part of the new stuff is you can’t turn it off. Once you click “Yes, continue” you’re in. And as far as I can tell, you can’t get back to the good old Google that worked just fine.
Google, I’m begging. Please pull a Lively and get rid of this thing fast.
OK – u think they r gonna just like tht pull out something .. … 100’s of engineers / Analysts have been woring on for months together ???
I’m in Oz, how do I get it to work??
You need to log in to a Google account, or else you just get a normal search.
The reason you need to login is so that they can store your (search result) preference and show it the next time you do a same (similar?) search.
If you are logged out, it would be hard to use a cookie to store all your search preferences.
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New Site For College Students: http://www.inkampus.com
The problem with this feature is not the thumbs up and down which are good, but the fact that each item you click goes via Google. In other words Google is knowing exactly which links you click on. And there is no way to turn this off. Time to look at other search engines
What are you talking about? Google have been able to do this since it was created, that’s not a new feature.
this is not new. For years, Google has shown one link, but when you click on it, you actually go to Google FIRST and get redirected to the correct place.
They use that information as a mechanism to improve search results.
ok, maybe I am wrong. I could have sworn they were doing that… but a quick check – maybe they’re not…. sorry to be confused
Yes, they do that. But they only do it if you turn on personalised search.
Scour.com has been doing this for a while and you get paid…I already got $50 for searching and moving the results up and down.
What’s wrong with this? Collecting data such as clicks count helps them improve results.
It’s one thing to search for porn. It’s an entirely different beast to look at it.
This will generate so much noise… Example: ‘Don’t visit this site, visit my site: http://super-ch...pods-n-stuff.us‘…
I was thinking the same thing. People will be spamming the results through comments.
However, I think that the fact that you can thumb up/down a comment, the crowd will control the comment quality.
Well, a site with a big community could ask its users to all vote for a specific site on a specific search results, in effect gaming the system.
Gaming the system will not be possible. Google knows everything about every website.
They also know everything about every user.
“Google knows everything about every website…” – that may be the funniest thing I’ve read all day.
I’m all for playing around with Google’s new features every time they’re released, but there are absolutely no circumstances whatsoever in which I want to have no control over when the features are active.
If I want to do a search as the average person, I should be able to turn off every possible “feature” and revert back to the absolute bare bones and default version of Google. PERIOD.
I agree it’s a wrong move. Now we have Google SpamSearch
Agreed. There’s ONE thing Google sucks at, and it’s community. None of their products have it, they never figure out how to control spam.
it’s unsightly disutility acts as a useful reminder to sign out of your google account — which has the concomitant benefit of slightly reducing the amount of data the company stores about your online behaviour.
agree.
I wish I could sign out but I need my Gmail.
PS: every time I leave a comment that evil snap preview suckthingie hovers over because I accidentally move my mouse over the seesmic thing.
The solution is to have multiple different profiles of FireFox running at the same time (they each keep separate cookie and session info), and keep one of them logged out of Google, remove the Google toolbar, etc. etc.
Create shortcuts like this:
Target: “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox3\firefox.exe” -no-remote -p firefox3b
with firefox3b being an example profile name (I have firefox2, firefox3, and so forth. You can also use this to keep different versions of FF running at the same time as well if you keep them separate on install.
@Alex, Mozilla Prism works well for doing that sort of thing. I usually run GMail and Reader through it.
They can probably track you anyway using cookies. Allthough you have signed out, there are still cookies that remain the same no matter what you do. Google doesn’t need people to be signed in to know who they are.
See above… and oh yeah, set that particular account to auto-clear cookies on close. Of course it’s also good to do manually from time to time.
This feature seems nice, but they should include an option. Few people will love this and few will hate it. Haters can turn it off. Simple!
google doing a scour.com?
It will be useful if you are doing research about a particular topic…but for general search this feature might become a PAIN.
I think they should give an option to kind of see both ‘types of results’ -(e.g. The traditional Search & this new SearchWiki) in a tab or something.
I second you. They understand that croudsourcing is good, but this is not crowdsourcing per se. It is half-digg. So has a lot of potential to be misuses
Wow, didn’t realize you can’t turn it off. Pretty sure they’ll make it possible for users to switch it off soon enough, though.
Definitely, there will probably be a link at the bottom of the page for disabling this feature.
May be we should comment on google.com in the search results, saying that this feature sucks…
Actually, its not so bad. Primarily, it is being projected as a tool for the individual, with an ‘option’ of seeing what others are saying.
It will of course not effect the search results outside of your own searches. Of course, Google can use the tons of data this will generate to fine tune searches.
So, for example if hundreds of thousands of users mark one site better than another for a particular search, it would be safe to assume that it is a better result.
To this Google can add some sort of weightage to each user based on how correct they are in all the things that they rate in their own searches to avoid spammers.
What a weird comment. First you say that this won’t affect results, and then you say that it will in the very next sentence.
It will make results for less popular search far more efficient. I barely even notice it when searching, so I don’t see how anyone could complain about a feature that is barely noticeable
how does this affect the performance of the page? is it still fast to download, is it getting bloated, or is it inserted post-load via AJAX?
I’d check myself, but I don’t want to click the button
Google just buried one of their USP: simplicity! that’s why Google took over yahoo et al. because google’s homepage was clean, tidy and simple. KISS google, KISS!
Says you. It’s still pretty simple to use.
I agree with that. For a company that measures the effects of every pixel, they’ve just added a WHOLE bunch of pixels to their nr1 page.
Actually, it’s surprisingly simple to use – pretty impressive how they managed to add so much in such an intuitive/unobtrusive way.
This seems useless to me. I never search for a site that I know I like, because if I like it enough I just navigate directly to it. So why would I bother bumping up my favourite sites if I’m never searching for them? I only search to find new information, and new sites that I don’t know I like yet. But that’s just me!
My guess is that this launch has been driven by the fact that a HUGE number of people use the google search box instead of the address bar in their browsers to get to websites. E.g. I remember reading a blog post by Bebo.com who said that the number one google search keyword that visitors to their site searched for was “www.bebo.com”. For these users, the SearchWiki service could be very useful. As an example: If you search for bbc, but the link to the BBC site always appears half way down the page (after the wikipedia article etc.), now you can bump it to the top for convenience.
This ties in with the example that Google use in the video. I’ve seen it with my own analytics on any sites I run, that people seem to be moving away from remembering URL’s and just relying on search keywords to navigate to sites. Google, I’m sure, has better data than anyone to inform them on this trend, and are trying to take full advantage of it.
If this is the case, I can see where they’re coming from. But the problem I see is this: The type of person that would use this service, the non tech-savvy customer that uses the search box instead of a url bar, would also be the type of person that wouldn’t log into Google. The type of person that would have an iGoogle account is me, or anyone else who reads blogs like this, and we’re the type of people that don’t need more unnessecary clutter in our search results.
That’s just my thoughts, but I’m sure the results of this launch will speak louder than hunches and guesses about the profile of the average iGoogle user. Maybe I should leave this as a comment on my search for “Google SearchWiki”!!
My thoughts exactly.
+1
Very true.
Well, the non tech-savvy customers are also likely to have GMail account, aren’t they?
Agree !!
On the other hand, may be we won’t have to bookmark stuff as much anymore. Like you get a nice link from a search today, and one week later you can’t find it. What if you don’t remember what it was and don’t have it in history? Happened to me before. With the Wiki thing, you know it’ll be there on the page. Plus, you can add your own URLs so the page kind of acts like a bookmarking folder. It can be even more powerful if Google lets you organize the links in the future.
strangely i (And some other collegues here in the office) don’t see those changes. I am logged in, on google.com and cleared my cache.
are they limiting this to a few ones? our SEO expert has no clue what they are up to right now
I think only people from the US can see it at the moment, presumably you’re not?
I’m in the US and I don’t see the up down buttons either, though I do see the ‘Note This’ links. Any idea what gives?
I have two gmail accounts and can see it on one and not on the other :/
Peter
http://www.thewebwar.com
I don’t see it either.
John
It’s a wonderful tool find new new keywords to match to a search result through comments. Better ad matching … with better meaning better for google
Unfortunatly spamming is always a concern, but fortunatly it’s always evident to humans. Human eyes are the ultimate spam-proof fighters.
I like this feature… and I realy can’t see why you people are screaming about it…
As long as Google limits its use to INDIVIDUAL results (so that SEOs can’t take advantage of it) it cannot be related to ANYTHING Arrington says…
Actualy, we are used to his “i-hate-everything-google-does” posts, his views are not surprising…
http://the-anti...y.blogspot.com/
i can see the thumbs down/up and the comments bubble but when i press it just displays an input box for my own comment. how do you see other peoples comments/ratings?
nevermind, found it. you’ve got to click on the “See all notes for this SearchWiki” at the bottom.
Absolutely astounding. What’s wrong with a good old fashioned Beta launch?
It’s been in beta for about 6 months..
oh
You don’t do a “beta launch” on top of the most profitable part of your business when you’re a multi-billion dollar company in an uncertain market. This isn’t some dogshit VC-funded web 2.0 project where you can play around with your website to your heart’s content regardless of what it does to your average user experience; this is the world’s most popular search engine.
Google is king of the betas Mr or Mrs Ninja.
Hey Mike,
I was just wondering if to test the service you used your most typical search query… Do you search often Techcrunch in Google?! I think any search engine, new or old, is fairly useless for Michael Arrington on this one
Now, Google may be right or wrong, time will tell, but how many things we found cool initially and we ended up never using?… The opposite scenario does exist too! Let’s see with your real search queries!
Ben
Google doesn’t do these things without some cold hard calculation. First they were huge because they were storing a link to every page they indexed. Next they were even bigger because they cached almost every page they indexed. Now they are takibg it another step by storing comments and ratings for almost every page they index. Just how much storage does Google have at it’s disposal?!?
Did Google have to become the Digg or Slashdot of search engines?
While I see that this can be useful for users to see how pertinent a site might be to their search to view comments from he users who found the site be fore them, I also see it as just another way for spammers and flammers to flood the comments thread as they do on Digg and Slashdot and other sites with a similar ratings/comments feature.
For the most part, sites like those are moderated through rating the comments, but even a simple thread can grown to many pages of “comments’ thanks to spammers and flammers.
I for one tend to avoid threads with posts like that and threads that have just grown too big before moderators lock it for comments.
I guess it’s really up to each of us who use Google to decide if this is a feature we want to use and keep them around as our choice of search engines. Otherwise, I say it’s time to start looking for a Google replacement/successor to avoid all the noise we’re going to see on the results pages.
Can you imagine the person who has to moderate this stuff?! Google, what have you got yourself into?
How about using everyone as collaborative moderators.
Good idea. How much are they going to pay us for that? Can we get stock options?
What do you think the result would be if they took that approach on wikipedia? Enough said.
I see no comments when I did a search on TechCrunch or anything else for that matter. How do you get to see comments?
http://www.tech...comment-2542297
I will tell you why they did it, It is the social media revolution and search engines are readopting themselves to it to get more users, for their statistical benefits, to attract more advertisers and more here: http://www.youtechno.info
Google today is just the beginning.
Google SearchWiki is a revolution, and very welcome in my opinion. I think they should have done this years ago.
I want them to activate a feature that displays a rating for each search result based on all users rating and thumbs up. Not only just a one-vote one-vote count, I want clever algorithms that kind of displays something like somekind of pagerank rating for each link, but it should be based on users manual ratings and their comments on each link.
If I want to know what the link is about, I am definitely going to be checking the comments and the Google link rating, especially if the search results title and description isn’t descriptive or revealing enough for me.
Or.. you could just click the link and see the site?.. OH MY GOD!
Yeah, and probably get problems for that. You never know whats behind that link. You click on anything you see?
Choose your behaviour:
[ ] I’m not afraid of viruses
[ ] I have Java enabled in my browser
[ ] I don’t care about traffic traps and help SEOs get their fame.
So let me get this straight, up until now, you have never clicked a link in google because you were afraid of being infected by a virus?
(and google tells you when it thinks a page has a virus or what not..)
I waited for this. Cool.
It’s exactly what I want, but the up/down votes SHOULD affect all WikiSearch users. You still can log out and use the regular Google, no matter what.
But now, searches going social.
Do you fear the opinions of the Users?
Troll comments will be burried quickly, no doubt.
You sir are a moron. you don’t even knwo what you’re talking about. Can you just stop replying at an intelligent blog such as techcrunh, cause you dont belong here. The purpose of search is to give a search result, not let other peole vote it up or down, or create a comment on it. It makes search (which is suppose to be simple) complicated. If i want a digg comment system then, il use dig.
So shutup already, loser.
No. You, bankai, are the loser. If you find community feedbacks so complicated that you can’t use them, don’t take it on other people who can.
This new feature will be a blessing for some and a curse for others. That’s the nature of change. I see lots of people saying, “time for a new search engine”, or happily letting their minds wander to conspiracy theories of their own concoctions. The truth is that google’s purpose is to give relevant results and they’ve never stopped tweaking their algorithms to that end.
You can still have your good ol’ results, just sign off, and i’m sure within a few weeks from now, you’ll even have a button to turn this feature off while signed in. So take a chill pill.
Here here. Bankai is a ranter. who calls search simple? search is about the most complicated thing around! Thats why Google has valuable shares. because its not simple to build a search engine.
It’s more powerful than I initially realized. I gave a green arrow up to the top result on “delaware shakespeare festival”, when I then searched “shakespeare festival” that same result (which usually comes in around page 3 ranked #25) was showing up with the green arrow clicked and in the number one position.
Um, the reason why Delaware Shakespeare Festival is showing first for you is because you just customized *your* search.
You did not expressly customize future searches for anyone else.
There is no doubt that even Google is having trouble sifting the vast, exponentially growing information to provide results people are looking for. For example, I was looking for statistics about use of social media in North Carolina. Nothing. Because there isn’t any? Or because it’s not online, or because Google couldn’t find it?
Taking the longer perspective, search will inevitably have to become more social as we rely on community as part of our personal information management systems. These PIMS are going to be part of our future and Google will be just one component, albeit an important one.
Just because Google returns good results does NOT mean it can not improve. Let’s face it – some SEO have cracked the PageRank algorithm – the ONLY way to improve results is use human intelligence.
This Wiki may not be the final solution, but it is a good step forward to Social Search
Here’s an idea. Why not use human intelligence to improve PageRank?
Isn’t this what WikiSearch might be all about in the future? Google might one day incorporate WikiSearch into its own PageRank if their experiment goes well.
Btw, just to be really correct, PageRank (the algorithm) is improved by human intelligence. It’s just that it is an algorithm that’s being tweaked, not the results. Tweaking the results is much harder because, well, there are probably hundreds of millions of webpages indexed by Google, how do you expect its small troop of employees (20000 now?) to be able to do that, even if you make everyone work on that.
What sort of person has time to sit there and edit search engine results? I don’t give a damn nor will 99.99% of people who use it.
But my priorities for results depend on why I’m searching. Just because I wanted the 47th result last time doesn’t mean I want it at the top of the list every single time I search in the future. If I’m writing a paper and I search “impala”, I want informative articles. If I’m doing a crossword puzzle I want to know how to spell it. If I’m in the market for a used car I want the Chevy Impala. I count on consistent results from Google (though I’m aware that they’ve already been messing with the ranking algorithm for some time). I don’t want to have to remember what context I was searching in yesterday or last week. And heaven forbid that I should be logged in as a different user — either because I’m at my mom’s computer instead of my own, or because I have more than one onlne identity. (Shocking, I know, but some people actually do that!)
I’m gonna hafta give up on iGoogle if logging out is the only way to defeat this “feature”. So glad my e-mail is still with yahoo instead of gmail.
Your results don’t automatically change just because you click on the results. You have to click on the up and down. Just ignore those buttons if you’re not interested on personalizing your search page..
Time to move to another search engine! Google’s era is about to end…
Sure it is. *rolls eyes and sighs*
Michael’s take on this is disappointing. It is a shame when people can’t objectively handle change. The changes look very promising and will in due course substantially improve the quality of results returned. By harnessing guidance from users, users are helping improve the strength of the search engine and also helping themselves.
You’re the moron, idiot. You know what problems this will present? The context of search. People search terms in different context. It could bury other useful information for me, if other people arent looking for it in the same context as mine.
You need to relax. Anyone who starts a comment with “You’re the moron, idiot.” needs to take some time off from the internet.
Well, considering that someone at the top of the tree can only go one way if you shake it a bit, you’ll understand his position. I see very few people on page one of google search embracing this feature.
In the past 2 years, I’ve increasingly been using del.icio.us, digg and the likes to find good resources and was frankly wondering what was google waiting for. So to me this is an overdue and quite welcome feature.
Unfortunately, I’m sure the social input will only be applied to natural searches in a couple of months. I can’t wait.
They should just make this “feature” an option. So if you like it, use it, if you don’t then disable it. problem solved.
They should have done like Yahoo! glue and released it as a separate URL. Is it a coincidence both Yahoo and Google are trafficking new search interfaces in the same week?
Arrington’s just pissed because they didn’t ask him first. Or more to the point, because TC didn’t break the story with the help of some rat Engineeer.
Too bad, so sad for you Mike.
Back to the salt mines buddy.
Google is always trying to make changes and tweaks. Overall they are usually for the better but not always.
*barf* enough of the meta-web. I just want a cold source to find information sometimes.
I think it is kind of funny that the comment you rated down, is also apparently valid, as evident by you voting it down. FAIL
Congratulations on showing the world your selfish bias and inability to take critisizm as an opportunity to improve.
…or you could give him credit for showing the negative comment in the first place. If he was afraid of it, do you really think he would have included it in the screen shot? idiot.
I’ve played with searchwiki and I’m not all that impressed. I am sure they’ll gather data – even though they are denying this now – but for the user it has little value. For the average user it’s just a glorified bookmarking tool. I already have a bookmark tool right there on my browser and Delicious as well. And, if my choices don’t affect the search results I don’t really care that much.
Even with the comments those don’t have much value because who’s really going to spend time reading the comments. It’s not like I’m buying a book on Amazon and care about the reviews. The search process is a few second process at best. That’s why Google is so great, because you get the results you want fast, and they are usually good results.
I can’t believe that Google won’t really be using this to gather data, and you can bet all SEO types will be testing this to see if it really can game the results.
It’s not google’s nature to pull off something like this in a large scale.
Did you see the GMail login screen? It is filled with mountains!
I prefer the oldskool [sic] google with plain white background and not
too much funny whacky stuff going on…
Having themes for GMail is okay cos its personal and you only see it.
But changing search in such a way that it does not really benefit me
in anyway is so moron minded.
It just wastes my time with playing thumbs down thumbs up an delete.
Now google searched the web 2 social hype, and enables spammers
to spam in more effective ways… What does google think? It is the biggest
digg, it is going to be the biggest dick?
This seems to work in Firefox, but in Opera it is still the old look.
Did anyone read the Google Book? Then you’d know that google’s
has come to be liked because of its simplicity and clean interface.
Now they have lost it and I begin to hate and fear google now on.
I feel like a lab rat in their labs…
A similar change happened in Orkut when the plain old blue interface
suddenly got changed into a Web 2.0 style… that sucked so much…
When they introduced themes, it seemed cool, and now every Tom
Dick and Hary uses one of the few profile themes available that makes
my eyes and mind sore… The classic blue was good.
Now I read the orkut blog and seems it was rolled out in India first and
I asume some moron from the Hyderabad or Bangalore Google must
have dreamed up that crap.
Classic google is good. My be its those same Dick headed dorks that
made my search useless.
Page Rank never really worked, searching for mandelian traits and
genetics brought up porn and lots of link spam… All search engines
brought up similar results… But the google search page and results
were plain white, classic, elegant and not littered with banners and
graphics like the competition…
But now it sucks and its time to use dogpile.
Hello if anyone from Google reads this… You Suck! I want my search back…
Regards
Robert
One of the speakers at the Web 3.0 Summit last month said that 50% of all search results are unsuccessful. Given that fact and that user generated ranking may be a stat that Google can add to their algorithm . I am pretty sure google records the sites that are being moved down to this may well provide a new dimension to SEO.
Michael, I kinda feel like commenting here is a waste b/c there are just SOOO many comments to weed through, but I hope you see this one.
See companies fail b/;c they rest on their laurels, they don’t innovate while they are still growing marketshare. As someone who tracks the space you especially value innovation and a constant desire to improve something. Yahoo didn’t innovate when they had huge marketshare in search and now where are they?
While I am not sure if I like this feature or not, I applaud google for innovating their CORE application, if they don’t someone else will and bypass them the same way that they bypassed Yahoo. Maybe nothing will come of this, but at least they are experimenting.
Very well said. I agree with mostly what you said.
Google isn’t afraid to try new stuff.
But look… As with CLICK FRAUD, underground and private communities of fraudsters existed and did quiet a lot of damage in the pay-per-click game which Google may have addressed, maybe not completely as this forums and rings of fraudsters still exist but on a smaller scale.
Anyways, this latest “wiki” feature opened a whole new window of opportunities for abuse and spam and before you know it people will be e-mailing everybody in their address bulk with a simple request to “search for this… click on that… and type this” blah blah
I am sure Google will normalize the data and in other words feedback they are getting each and every second regarding whatever sites and will apply many filters.. What they really need to do is count each users “votes” randomly maybe every one out of ten times…. x1000 random users out of 10 random “good will” votes they can get a more or less a pretty good score.
I have not analyzed this stuff as much as need be but it could work…
Let it play out… it’s all good
Best,
Mike
http://www.wannadevelop.com/
Google is inching closer and closer to becoming “Big Brother”… But what can you do, their technology is second to none.
I remember when Michael and crew changed all kinds of stuff about the wasn’t broke techcrunch.com preaching that while change is hard it would end up being for best in the long run.
And once again everyone was preaching to jump ship to another tech blog.
Well sorry Michael but I have a feeling that a lot more time, research and thought went into these much smaller changes on Google then went into the changes you made, so stop being such a hipacrit.
Apparently now it’s being forced on us. I just went to google.com and did a search and without clicking on any “Yes, continue” buttons I was presented with the horrible new interface. So now they’ve screwed up igoogle and their search.. if they mess up gmail then I’ll be completely google-free. So sad to watch them implode over the past few months.
The results are the same…why would you care about 2 buttons to the right of the listsings? What are you gonna go do? Use MSN? Lycos? They’ll really miss you.
That’s the same with me, but when I click on any of the button, I’ll be given a prompt thing..
Google [regular] search is utterly and completely broken at non-trivial searches. Search Google News for any topic you know a lot about and you’ll see just how broken it is. The Gogglenet is selling us short.
Alta Vista is harder to use but gives better results.