Last Thursday Google launched its SearchWiki which enables you to customise, contribute to, and comment on Google search results. If you are logged into your i-Google account you can:
- promote results you like and disappear results you don't
- add new results to the front page of a search for a particular term
- add comments against websites that other people logged on to i-google will be able to access when that same website appears in their search results.
It is a significant change. Google have always shunned human influence over their algorithm driven search results, in order to ensure that they return the most authoritative sites for any given search term. The price that Google have paid for this authority is a lack of currency and human interest.
Robert Scoble posted here that SearchWiki has been introduced because Google were alarmed at the short length of time that people spend on their search site. People type in their search term, pick something from the first page and disappear. This contrasts with the way people linger at sites such as Facebook and Delicious which have a social dimension.
SearchWiki is a bid to bring some colour and liveliness to Google's search results, but the tentative way that they have gone about it has drawn criticism from influencial writers in the technology sphere. Michael Arrington of Tech Crunch urged his readers to kill off SearchWiki by opting out of it. The ReadWriteWeb blog called it a 'train wreck' and criticised Google for putting the word 'wiki' into its title, without providing most of the functionality you expect from a wiki.
Google is the best search engine around when you are researching subjects that are unfamiliar to you. But if you know a topic well then the first page of Google search results for that seach will be full of web pages that you are already familiar with.
For subjects that I want to keep up to date with (records management, SharePoint etc.) I prefer a visit to the following pages on the social bookmarking site Delicious.
These pages display links to the webpages that have been recently tagged and bookmarked by Delicious users. A brilliant blogpost may never garner enough inbound links to make up into the top few pages of Google, but one person bookmarking it in Delicious propels it, temporarily, to the top of the delicious page for the term they have tagged it with.
The social nature of Delicious provides an element of serendipity missing from the machine generated Google search results. When I look at the resources tagged 'recordsmanagement' in Delicious I often recognise the names of some of the contributors, I can click through to the pages that collect together all the material that they have tagged, and in the process glean new links (and get to know a bit more about the range of interests of those individuals).
Is SearchWiki an alternative to bookmarking your favourites in your browser or on Delicious?
SearchWiki offering an alternative of sorts to social bookmarking sites such as Delicious. I could choose to add a data protection website to the Google SearchWiki by
- copying the website url
- logging on to my i-google account
- searching on the term I want to remember the blogpost by (in this case 'data protection')
- scrolling to the bottom of the results page
- clicking on 'Add a result' and pasting in the website's url
In practice Google is offering you less than Delicious:
- Delicious creates a page for you that brings together all the resources that you have bookmarked. This page is publicly accessible to allow others to benefit from your bookmarks
- Google does not offer you any home page to gather together the pages you have added, promoted or commmented on using the the SearchWiki. Your sites are scattered under the Google search terms you have added them to. The effects of your promotions and additions will not show in other people's search results. Any comments that you have left against a particular site will, however, be accessible to other i-google users whenever that site appears in their results
How will SearchWiki cope with spam?
Most web 2.0 applications start small, too small to be of interest to spammers. By the time they have grown large enough to attract the spammers attention they have established patterns of behaviour that mean that spam is easy to recognise and deal with. Google SocialWiki is different: the monetary and reputational value of Google search listings mean it is worth spamming from the off.
Micheal Arrington at Tech Crunch reported that a spammer had left a SearchWiki comment against the link to the Tech Crunch site, advertising their porn channel. I did a search on Tech Crunch yesterday lunchtime and noticed that it had 282 comments saved against it, just a few days into the operation of SearchWiki. By comparison Barack Obama's home page had only received 42 comments at the same point in time.
This implies to me that admirers of Tech Crunch have reacted to the blogpost by visiting SearchWiki and leaving positive comments to drown out the spam: a similar behaviour to that which protects Wikipedia pages against vandalism.
SearchWiki does not provide users with the standard tools that most wikis provide to deal with vandalism. If you see spam on a Wikipeadia page you can get rid of the spam and revert to a previous version of the page. With SearchWiki you cannot touch the spam comment.
The big risk for Google is that people will leave offensive or spam comments against the websites of companies that are giving Google their revenue stream by paying to advertise with them. If campaigners left hundreds of comments criticising a company for, say, its environmental record, would Google continue to leave that SearchWiki open? Would that company continue to pay to advertise with Google?
TechCrunch have a loyal readership who have defended them: what about unloved websites? Several bloggers have asked whether Google got any method for defending them against spam comments.
The user experience of SearchWiki
If you want to see the SearchWiki comments relating to the TechCrunch site then follow these steps:
- Log on to your i-google account
- do a google search for TechCrunch,
- scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on 'all notes for this SearchWiki'
- go back up to the listing for the TechCrunch site and click on the thought bubble beneath the link
If Google like the way SearchWiki is going I would expect them (or third party developers) to provide browser buttons giving shortcuts for leaving SearchWiki comments and for promoting, demoting or adding a site to a particular search result.
The opportunities and risks for Google of going social
The big opportunity for Google is that the comments feature on the Search Wiki could become a forum for the rest of the world to give feedback on, and to debate, every extant website. If you think a company's website is too superficial, rather than send a comment to their website you might leave a comment against the website on the SearchWiki, to be viewed by anyone logged on to i-google.
If the SearchWiki comments end up being informative they will provide an incentive for people to log into their i-Google account before searching, which will increase the likelihood of them taking up the other services that Google offers.
If SearchWiki takes off I expect Google to use the data from Search Wiki promotions and additions as an input into a search results feature that displays 'what is hot' : websites or blogposts that are rapidly rising through the rankings and being frequently promoted or added.
The risk for Google is that they fail to please anyone, they may end up:
- offending the web community and blogsphere by not providing enough social features
- offending companies that pay for their advertising by exposing their websites to criticism and spam when they appear in search results.
Can Google walk the tightrope? Will the sheer size of the audience for their search results mean that people will leave comments and companies will pay for adverts regardless of their opinion of SearchWiki?
Watch this space!
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