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Google’s SearchWiki - Next Social Powered Search Engine?

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Google had launched a service called SearchWiki sometime last month. But it had disappeared for some reason. And now, for the past few days I have been seeing it back again.

SearchWiki is an additional feature for Google which appears when you login to your Google Account. Yes, it only works if you are logged into your Google Account (Gmail, Google Docs…etc). Once logged, when you do search on Google, small icons will appear beside each search result. With these icons you can either promote (i.e move up) or remove particular result from the results page altogether. (see below).

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The effects of your removing or promoting certain websites will only be visible to you. In other words, it won’t affect the real results of Google.com (at least for now).

So, it’s like… personalizing Google results according to your own needs. What if, you know a site that is not there in the results? Well, you can add them, as simple as that. (see below)

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“Add a result” link is located at the footer of the page. You can also manage all your promoted and removed results by going to “See all my SearchWiki notes”

What it means for Google

It means a small step for Google but a giant leap for better search results ;) Seriously, it means a big deal for Google. It’s a matter of time when SearchWiki results will replace the normal Google search results.

Because Google’s current PageRank based system for its search results is prone to manipulation. And it has been struggling to contain this issue - fighting all those who pass PR to other sites (i.e who do not use rel=”nofollow” code on their text ads and other outgoing links. Most banner formats are automatically added “nofollow” by Google).

Google is very smart, by leaving SearchWiki for “personal use only” for sometime, they will actually generate a different set of parallel results for the same keywords searched in Google. And most likely, these combined SearchWiki results will be a better, more accurate results. Simply because they are generated by millions of people.

When leaving it for “personal use only”, it’s also less likely to be spammed. Because people will be improving their own results without knowing that they are actually improving the whole search engine results.

Could it be spammed?

Sure, once it goes public, people will try to spam it. But it’s less likely to affect the results. Because the ratio of the spam entries (submitted by tens of people?) compared to the legitimate entries (submitted by millions of people) would be too small. And even if they make to the first page, people could easily removed such entries by clicking “X” near to it.

Summary

I think Google is onto something great here. When it goes public, we can expect less spam and more accurate results. With all the social networking things going on on the net, it’s definitely the right thing to do for Google - to let the people manage the results.

What do you think? Please leave your opinion in the comments.