Posts Tagged ‘SearchWiki’

Google recently announced the official release of SearchWiki, a set of personalization features for your Google search results. The personalization features enable a user to perform various tasks including:

• Reshuffling or resorting (and removal of) results
• Attaching notes or comments to your results
• Suggesting a website to be included in the results

Additionally, these features allow users to share their SearchWiki results of others in Web 2.0 fashion.

While the ability to personally change search results and add comments/content to websites has led to some significant discussions regarding SEO and privacy of user data, respectively, the bigger question that we’ve been asking ourselves is whether this feature has legs. While Google has let the genie out of the bottle, we’ve all seen how Google can kill an idea. — Google recently announced the shutdown of Lively, a 3D Virtual Worlds set to complete with SecondLife, only 6 months after launching it.

Here are several reason why SearchWiki is here to stay:

Reason #1: Most of the features in SearchWiki are not really new.
Google has allowed users to attach notes to their search results since March 2007 when they took Google Notebook out of beta. Also, users have been able to submit a website to Google for inclusion since the very beginnings. And while users could not reshuffle their search results, they’ve also been able to report website that were using unscrupulous SEO techniques to have them removed from the results (BMW got in trouble for this recently). The biggest change is that SearchWiki brings these features together onto one page — the Google Search Results page.

Reason #2: Users expect these kind of features. Going hand-in-hand with the reason above, users are already accustomed to these features. For starters, there are other, lesser-known search engines, such as Collarity, that offer personalization. Secondly, the idea of democratically promoting stories to the forefront has been gaining steam with the popularization of Digg, which has also shown phenomenal growth in the number of registered Digg users. Lastly, most blogs (including ours) enable users to add comments/notes to posts. In fact, Google also enables commenting in Google Reader (see image below).

Notes/Commenting in Google Reader

Reason #3: Google has put this release through the ringer. For the past six months, Google has been testing the interaction of beta testers/users with SearchWiki. This is typical of Google as they commonly release products first into beta (or even a limited beta) before making it publicly available.

Reason #4: SearchWiki fixes the problem with Google Search Results. While Google has been an increadibly successful company, it is definitely not perfect. And one of the biggest issues with Google searches is the results index is refreshed on a monthly basis — this is referred to as the Google Dance. So the site that you found interesting may not appear in the top results when you return to Google.  That means that you’ve got to bookmark your site if you think that you may want to look at it in the future.

Thinking about the future, it seems that the adoption of SearchWiki will do two things for Google:

• Improve the amount of time that a user spends on the Google, which will hopefully improve ad revenue.
• Futher modify user behavior to a point that may lead to the death of bookmarketing services, such as Delicious.

If you’re a Google shareholder, SearchWiki is not such a bad thing after all.