Did Google Just Ruin Its Search? – New Social “Search” Update (Google SearchWiki)
Posted on | November 21, 2008 | No Comments
Google got a little add-on today: a “social” search preference called “Google SearchWiki”. This little feature wasn’t even added onto Google Experimental… it went straight to the “Real Thing”.
Google SearchWiki: Make Search Your Own
What the heck are they doing? What are they thinking? Should I switch to Yahoo!?
Nah, it’s not really that bad–i think. In fact, this little “social” plugin only works when you’re signed in with your Google account. You then have the option to promote a URL in your search (or demote it) and also add some comments about that URL. Sorta cool… and cheesy… I guess. Does this impact the domaining industry? In my opinion, yes. A majority of the “domainers” I know are domain parkers. When you make money off of domain parking, you need all the edge you can get… and when something like this is released… that’s not a good thing. The user now has the power to knock down your super-optimized mini-site and/or that parked page that’s ranked in Google for some reason (but you don’t mind at all cause you’re getting great traffic from it). Yeah THAT traffic… “that” sort of traffic most likely isn’t going to disappear, but if this *really* catches on, then it might decrease by a large share.
Solution? I think the only solution is to evolve when changes like this happen. When people are given the power to see what they want in the search engine results, they are obviously looking for quality quality quality–those are most likely the sites that are going to get “promoted“.
A one-page crapper-site (yes, crapper, not scraper… which are pretty much the same thing) isn’t something I can see someone promoting and writing good comments about when seeing it the top 3 results when there are much more informational sources, like Wikipedia (just an example), that might be a couple spots under you. THAT’S the problem with this. I can’t exactly say it still pushes me away from this whole idea of “social search results”, but it definitely doesn’t attract me to it.
The main question everyone has is: Will Google start using this information? If Site A keeps getting “promoted” even though Site X ranks above it, will they take that into consideration for the future for their search index? That’s what I’ve been thinking about… and it’s also a scary thought. I highly doubt it, but if they do… SEO (search engine optimization) will definitely change.
Want a little more information regarding Google SearchWiki? Check out the Google SearchWiki post, or watch the Google SearchWiki video below:
Google SearchWiki: Make Search Your Own
Tags: google > google search > google searchwiki > search wiki > social search > social search engine results
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