Google SearchWiki – great innovation or unnecessary tinkering?
There’s a huge demand at the moment for interaction on the Web. Whether its comment sections on blogs, video responses on YouTube, or Web 2.0 sites such as Digg which allow us, the users, to dictate what’s popular and what isn’t. The demand is so great that Google is jumping on the bandwagon, with the new Google SearchWiki.
The Google Search engine is known the world over as the largest, most comprehensive, and most useful site on the Internet. In fact, without Google, the Web would be a much harder place to navigate. But one of the reasons it works to the extent where it’s probably the most famous site in the world is its simplicity.
But the options available on Google Search have just been upped quite considerably with the roll-out of Google SearchWiki. At the moment, this is only available to people with a Google account who are signed in when they visit Google Search, but this could change in the future.
SearchWiki was announced on the Official Google Blog along with a video presentation of some of its features. As you can see from the embedded video below, SearchWiki adds a range of options for customizing search results on Google, whether you want those options or not.
In essence, SearchWiki allows you to vote results up and down depending on how well they suit your needs, and allows you to comment on each individual search result. You can even nix a search result entirely if you either hate the site listed or find it not very useful.This seems to be an attempt at making Google Search more like social media sites such as Digg, Reddit, and Mixx.
Thankfully, what you do to the search results currently only affects you. If each customization affected all Google Search users then we’d have anarchy on our hands. But believe it or not, Google isn’t ruling out majority rule in the future. Which worries me.
What happens, for instance, if Google does start taking notice of the up and down movements of sites within the collective SearchWiki? Could negative comments about a certain website result in Google pushing it down the rankings? If the data does start being used to shape the bigger picture then the system is massively open to abuse.
But that’s a possibility in the future. For now, I personally find the whole thing a little pointless and agree with Michael Arrington at TechCrunch that Google Search wasn’t broken, so why try and fix it?
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