Man, this one brings a few conversations to the table;

A. Active participation by the user is called; explicit feedback. Now, while it is the holy grail of signals, it is often not easy to come by. In shoty, the average user doesn't really want to participate. They want to get in, get it done, get out. Thus they have had to settle more with the noisier 'implicit feedback' over the years. So, will this time out be any different? Will enough people use it to really make an impact in search quality? (remember SearchWiki?)

B. Do people sometimes read a little too much into things? Sure it makes a great title/post, but I have to wonder about calling this one a done-deal anytime soon.

That was it... just seems an interesting discussion to have...

I seem to remember a time when Google use to display a red 'X' button next to search results when you were logged in. This customization allowed you to personalize frequented searches so that only the ones you wanted at the top would be displayed at the top.

I no longer see that button but they still have the Star feature that allows you to like/favorite a result.

On an individual scale I never found it exceedingly useful (probably b/c I am an SEO). But I imagine as a crowd-sourced location for signals about individual results (if used) it may be helpful to Google to find the craftiest of content spam offenders.

Yep, @matthew, that was SearchWiki which I think they referenced in the article.

Well, the problem once again comes back to how well various explicit feedback systems have been over the years - which is mostly useless unforunately. They sound great on paper, but never seem to catch on. People are generally not interesting in participating. Thus I am leery as to where this inference will lead.

And yea, Search Wiki (and Site Wiki) even are recent implementations of this.