Google’s SearchWiki Disappears, Reappears

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

Google’s effort to customize search results, SearchWiki, which was just launched late last week, has already vanished, according to reports and my own empirical data.

Yep, I can no longer see it in my search results, despite the fact I had seen it earlier when I wrote about it.

One much criticized problem with SearchWiki was that there was no apparent way to turn it off. Since then, people have found ways using 3rd party extensions to Firefox and the like to disable it, but no Google-sanctioned way aside from logging out of your Google account.

And in addition, reports have surfaced about the comment feature I discussed in my original post being used for all manner of spam, obscenities, and garbage. And remember, as I said, comments you post for an URL are seen by everyone, not just you.

Good way to diss a competitor or just produce the equivalent of Internet graffiti? Yep.

Er, doesn’t anyone at Google look at how much comment spam there is on their own Blogger product? Makes you wonder “what they were thinking of” when they rolled this out. It seems like the comments would at least need moderation.

So where’s SearchWiki gone? Hopefully for some revamping. We’ll see.

Update: Well, drat, it appears this is a bug rather than a revamp.

“We’re really sorry that people can’t use SearchWiki at the moment – we’re working to fix the problem as quickly as we can. Please bear with us.”

Update: It’s back, for better or worse.