Google’s SearchWiki Adds Customization to Search

• Author: admin
• Filed under: Tech News
• Date: Nov 24,2008

It seems like search engines aren’t satisfied with just providing textual search results. First Yahoo! unveils Glue to U.S. users, which aggregates normal search results with blog posts, videos, ads (what else) and the like, and now Google has unveiled its own take: SearchWiki.

SearchWiki allows you to raise or lower a search results ranking in your list of results (the up / down arrows above). The arrow in the screenshot is colored green as I have already raised it. You can also remove search results by clicking on an “x” icon. Finally, you can add comments to a result.

You can also manually add URLs by clicking on the “Add a result” link at the bottom of the search result page; you can also see — and undo — any changes you’ve made by clicking on “See all my SearchWiki notes,” as well as see others’ changes by clicking “See all notes for this SearchWiki.”

The feature only works if you are logged into your Google account, and your rank changes only apply to any searches you do.

Finally, you can add comments, by clicking on the “thought balloon”-ish icon next the to search results. These, unlike the search ranking changes you made, are public comments. Just as with ranking changes, you can remove these comments if you wish, by once again clicking on “See all my SearchWiki notes.”

The comment is tied to the URL, not the SearchWiki. Thus, any time that URL appears in any search, those comments will be available.

The question is, do these additions to a basic search, not just SearchWiki but Yahoo! Glue as well, help or hinder searchers? Do we really need all this extra stuff or not? After all, the beauty of the Google Home Page was its simplicity, which they have fought hard to keep.

More questions? Google has a short demo video: