In the last few weeks Google has released SearchWiki, a service that allows users with a Google account to organise their own natural search results. In their never ending quest to improve the way individuals search this service allows the flexibility for users to promote search results for a certain phrase up their own list and disregard listings that they think are pointless. Thus creating a purpose built list per search phrase.
Good points – it puts the user in control.
Bad points – you can only organise a particular search phrase, so unless you search for something on a regular basis, what’s the point?
Another interesting feature that SearchWiki has is the system to include comments on the sites you have moved around your own list. These comments are then published to other Google users as they search for similar phrases. This allows for community based interpretations of SERPs. The comments are signed with the commenter’s user name.
This feature has received varying criticism over the last week with Web professionals and academics citing the lack of an opt out feature as being the biggest gripe. It seems that some people just don’t want to see other peoples comments.
Other issues have been SPAM and unwanted comments under certain webpages listings. The Microsoft listing has been affected in such a way with some of its comments being along the lines of:
“Microsoft sucks.”
“They are sucking less… but they still suck.”
And my personal favourite “Hi, I’m a Mac”
Google, for some bizzare reason are leaving the clean up of these comments to the users themselves. Opting for a voting system for other users to vote off unwanted comments. But why would they bother doing that? It was the users who put them there in the first place and if it were me I’d just ignore the discriminatory comments anyway.
The final point people have been making is the fact that with SearchWiki Google now has a more comprehensive system for logging user behaviour. They admit that they have been logging search trends for some time to better improve the quality of certain SERPs. However they can now see how users want to rank certain pages under certain phrases. It even goes as far as having the users identify pages that haven’t yet been picked up by the search spiders. Essentially Google have released a service that can, from one angle or another, be perceived as a replacement for their automated spidering service.
Although Google have stated that the data from SearchWiki will not be used to manipulate the normal, non-logged on SERPs. I find it very hard to believe that this will be the case. How will if effect SEO? Well it’s very hard to say at this very early stage. Google are adament that the SearchWiki data will not be used so until there is evidence that it has (if there ever will be), we just cannot say how SEO techniques will be effected in the long term.
Is this the start of the end of natural search? I doubt it.
Martin Vernon
Head of Systems and Security
