Posted on November 24, 2008 - by Steven Finch | Visited 1037 times, 11 so far today

Google Search Wiki: Digg Type Feature That Promotes Stories You Like

Google had been testing SearchWiki for months with only very limited users, then last week they decided to actually turn it on.

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).

Demo video is below:

SearchWiki is a Digg like feature which I just simply dont understand. Google search has been on the steady increase since it first launched and if something isnt broken then why fix it! 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.

With SearchWiki the question that has to be answered is, what is the added value here? From what I can see there really isnt any added value to this product. It allows users to promote stories they actually think is worth reading, but it doesnt really affect the overall rankings of these sites in basic search results. Probably like most Google users I rarely search for the same terms twice, so im not too sure what the point is of promoting a story on your own page if no one else can see the changes.

Over at Techcrunch they guess that these changes were made to see what kind of data they can gather, and how it can be used to improve overall search results. 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.

Currently, SearchWiki cant be turned off (unless you use a Greasemonkey script) and it is probably time already Google turned this service off like they did to Lively during last week!

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