Google have unveiled their new SearchWiki. While you are logged into your Google account and perform a search you will now see two little icons along side every search result. You now have the option to promote that result or get rid of it completely.
At the bottom of the page you can add a website to the search results on this page – this additional site will only show up when you are logged into your Google account. Watch the short video for instruction on how to use.
SEO Implications
As I provide search engine optimisation services my immediate thoughts are on the impact to SEO. Google say in the video that these results will not appear in other search results – but surely that can only be a matter of time.
I cannot believe that any company would ignore the possibilities this has over time. Google can aggregate all the up and down clicks by users and add it to the current ever changing algorithm. This has some user benefits – less spam pages cluttering the search results eventually; crap made for Adsense sites would become a threatened species, and SEO consultants have something else to worry about, (must say that last part gives me a laugh). If anyone can vote a website up or down it will not take long before we have companies offering this as a service with thousands of Google accounts.
Let’s Sue Google
On some forums in Ireland you cannot mention certain companies due to legal actions. But what is there to stop me from setting up an anonymous Google account and leaving libellous messages on all my competitors’ websites? Well nothing at present – though I have noticed that my Gmail account doesn’t have access to SearchWiki though my company account does (update, this has changed and has been rolled out to gmail accounts)- this could mean it is still being rolled out.
Long Term Search Results
Something like this had to change. It is going to be interesting to see how Google manages this going forward. Finding a way to get user input to influence the search results must be the dream of search engineers as LSI does not appear to be making a huge difference to the search results, the changes I do notice are in American English and not British English.
The internet as one huge social network… kind of blows my mind. I am away to see if I can influence the search results in any way and play with my votes for a while.
Hi Leslie
I’ve come across you a few times on iwf.ie and your comments are always insightful. I go by the user name DRang3d. I too am concerned about how searchwiki is going to influence the serps. At least with link building it is easier to make each “vote/link” appear from a different source, i.e. from a different ip address across multiple domains. If searchwiki is going to be used more in ranking, it’s going to be harder to manipulate if every users search is traced back to their ip address or to their google account. I agree in the long run it will be best to provide quality results but it is definitely going to make it harder and more labour intensive to influence. I for one will be keeping a close eye on this.
Leo