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.
All I see is a giant reputation management nightmare. Time to go off and post negative comments on sites that compete with me.
I would add my voice to the echo chamber – if they don’t innovate, they will die a Yahoo-like death. Despite being the best search engine, it’s still far from perfect.
This probably wasn’t some random idea that Sergey had in the bath – I’m sure it’s been thoroughly market-tested. While New Coke’s marketing team could tell you that research is no guarantee of success, a failure to innovate is a guarantee of failure.
Umm, if you don’t want to use the feature just sign out of iGoogle. For being a tech blog, you guys sure can be stupid.
I did not even get the option to opt out of this. It really does clutter up the UI and results.
Is there a way to read more than ten comments in searchwiki?
I’m already seeing spam, LOL
“The worst part of the new stuff is you can’t turn it off”
I agree
I was at first quite pro this feature as it would hopefully enable for people to get more relevant search results, but in the end I think that the feature is drifting away from one of Google’s most attractive points, which is its simplicity. We don’t want clutter when we search, just results.
Scour.com is already doing this, and you get paid for it!
This is so shit it hurts.
Searchers will decide if these features are good or bad, however, Google admits collectively human may do a better job than machine or AI.
Michael, when was the last time you took your CS Information Retrieval class? This change has the potential to improve websearch in general competely. In fact, it’s one of the most fundamental concepts in IR: feedback loop. Many search engines have tried this before, incl. AltaVista, but they never got it right. Google, I think has finally made feedback loops work. In retrospect, this will be one of the most considerable improvements in search quality in years, so stop with your hate speech already, and find another thing to hate and make your blog popular with.
I think you have nailed this one Mike. It seems that many large web companies get an itch to be cool. We have seen Microsoft fail many times because of this “itch”. Google is already cool enough. They are running down too many rabbit trails. I don’t believe for one second that they aren’t monitoring what users are doing with the search wiki comments and ranking. All this is going to do is encourage trolls to leave dirty, useless comments and create havoc for SEO in the future, should Google decide to roll these user results to the web (maybe in the form of a tab that users can click on to reveal comments) That would be hell for e-commerce sites that struggle to keep good ratings. This just has problems written all over it…. Let the enigma google algorithm sort the organics.
First thing I did: remove Expert’s Exchange from my search results.
Totally worth it.
I wrote up an analysis of this move by Google here.
http://willobri...gle-searchwiki/
I think this is an untimely risk and misstep by the search giant.
me thinks google is having a hard time indexing the current web and needs more data on the best way to do it. there was a reason they wanted digg.
My thoughts exactly!
Oh btw
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New Jobs. CauseForce. Strands. Carbine Studios. NCsoft.
I should benefit a great deal from being able to blacklist results. I often do searches that come back with a lot of patent sites or members-only technical journals. Those don’t provide any information I can use, and they take time to sift through. They’re effectively just ads.
(And some claim ACAP is a net gain? It dilutes good results with ones that have less utility!)
I disagree with this post. Why would Google pull a feature that they just spent months working on a day after it is released? The time and money spent on this feature will pay off in my opinion. For Google to ignore the use of user voted searches would be arrogant of them. SearchWiki should affect everyones searches for the sake of finding even better results. Someone’s hours of searching will benefit me in the end if they vote up the search.
Google is getting more close to making their engine more social by adding social features…
Most of the ppl use digg and other social bookmarking sites but they curse when Google attempts to do something similar
I wonder why:P
I am pretty sure that Google will not blindly follow the comments and “kill” a site from the serps
I think more tweaking to SearchWiki will come later..Just be patient…
http://www.seob...search-algo-you
Aaron Wall’s opinion on this
It is interestnig to read
Google hasn’t done anything big as far as the social 2.0 stuff goes and failed in the Social aspects of web innovation… They luckily had their chance to buy in on the frenzy when they got YouTube for $1.5b
This may be their way of saying “we get it” and that this is actually going to work as search will be more relevant…..
A whole lot of if’s though
Mike
http://www.wannadevelop.com/
It’s amazing that Google did this without an opt-out. But it shows how greedy they are to feed intelligent (aka human) data back into the algorithm. And make no mistake, that’s what it’s about, helping to make the search algorithm smarter.
So, they’re making logged in users their own free mechanical turk:
http://www.blin...mechanical-turk
It probably puts a Digg acquisition out of the question as well.
How many others think that what Mike dislikes most is that unlike this blog he can’t sensor out comments he does not like?
Personally, I think it’s a way for google to evaluate social searching in comparison to their current search algorithm. Think about it. In a few weeks they’ll have an enormous amount of data and votes. They can then easily run a number of tests with this information and compare serps from classic google to their searchwiki results. If it turns out that humans do a better job then their algorithm for sorting content and reducing spam, they can then apply these votes in one way or another to improve rankings.
Is this Google’s New Coke moment?
this is totally sad. i saw it last night on google before reading this article and was like, “wtf???” – why didn’t this go to labs first? i don’t want people’s opinions in my google. crap!
Not such a great idea…turned on “All notes for this searchwiki” …displayed comment for techcrunch is spam for a pr0n site. Unless google does some filtering this is going to be a spamfest.
What is to stop people making malicious comments? With this functionality enabled, you might NOT want to rank highly on search!
If ever Google starts using the results from Google Wiki for their normal searches, they will just kill themselves as Adsense has no value any more.
Then a company just hires a company (India or China) having their employees promoting all the website links on searches.
That’s what I was thinking – keyboard monkeys from any Krakozia working their red asses off for 2 cents per 1000 clicks would level the whole system back to stone age in less then a week…
I guess/hope this throws a wrench in the SEO trickeries. If Digg/Reddit is any indication, it’ll be the sites with substance that’ll move to the top.
Isn’t this an indication of integration of google search with google friend connect?
no searchwiki if you subscribe to keyboard shortcuts experimental search.
roxor shortcuts and cleaner results with fewer ads.
http://www.goog...m/experimental/
Wow, some people just like to complain…
So this puts two tiny easily ignored icons next to the search result. So? If you don’t want to use the feature, don’t click on the icons. As to the comments, it also is one very tiny little speech balloon after the result. Also easily ignored. I certainly have no intention of clicking on it, as I could care less what the “community” thinks of the search result.
I wouldn’t have even noticed the entire new feature set if I hadn’t read about it on a couple of sites.
To see this as a huge deal that merits all the angst from the author of this post is just another example of how “Google Bashing” is becoming the new “Microsoft Bashing”. Sad.
other search engines. yeah, right. who?
I love the improvement – and I’m not terribly worried that self promotion will become a player in Google search results or relativity and weight. Having said this I disagree that something needs to be broken to warrant any improvements – “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” isn’t exactly the attitude of forward thinking development or growth.
Just out of curiosity commented my own blog on that search, no comments appear so far.
Also, wouldn’t it be just another way to game the system – similar to Digg’s issues with groups promoting each other’s stuff?
It’s so like Google these days to disallow any kind of configuration.
I don’t think there will ever be a switch to turn off the socialness of logged in Google search.
Just like there will never be a switch to turn off tabs in the Chrome.
Google has never been about choice. Either you take Google or you leave it. This is the rule of the day. As far as social features? Google has never, and I mean, never, created something that they couldn’t buy from someone else first. Google has never been social, and there isn’t anything going on here that’s going to convince me that they ever will become social. Sure, they can buy “social”, but that’s about as truly social as they will ever get.
There hasn’t been anything cutting edge at Google since they patented the PR Algo. Now just why do you suppose that is? When you’ve got money, there’s no need to be creative. They buy the technology from others, and when they get it home, they pull it out of the box, slap their own label on it … and tout it as if it were their own from very the start.
All of what we’ve seen come out of Google over the past 5 years, has been stuff that was written by other people/companies 5 years before that.
Google can buy whatever or whoever they want, and even by doing this, it will never change the fact that most of this stuff is all pretty old news.
Call me an off-cocked-n-cagey-ole-coot if you want to, as I am neither for or against Google per se’ … I know where most of their bleeding edge stuff came from, and until Google comes out with something of their own, I’ll still use the old Alta Vista as a start page.
As an added note;
Google’s logged in social search isn’t really anything more than what The McKinley Group Inc. did with mckinley.com (search) clear back in 1996.
Dear Google, if I can’t depend on your results. Who loses the most? You, me, or your shareholders? Your search results right now are worse than EBAY SEARCH RESULTS. I hope you print this out have a staff meeting over that point alone. Look at what happened to ebay when sellers could no longer trust the integrity of the system.
I dont want to be social in my google search. I want to type and get results that return results with my keywords in it. If I wanted to be social, I’d go to a library and have someone with knowledge go find it for me
Google got me confused one time. I thought my site was on first page but then found out that I am log in and my web history is on. So that gave me a better explanation.
They are just added these features so they can further their control of behaviour marketing. The data they have on a person, the more they can analyze about us. And show the ads that appeal to us. They don’t care about us, just expanding their control over us and the marketing industry. google is evil!
Everytime you turn around it looks like Google is doing something new. They want to serve their target market the best way possible. The method you mention in this post sounds a lot like the new Google SideWicki that came out recently for Google Toolbar users.