Sphinn - Google's Digg-Like Social Search = SearchWiki

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Google's Digg-Like Social Search = SearchWiki

Went Hot: November 1, 2008 - 12:29 am
Posted By: UtahSEOpro 247 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.enterprisesocialsearch.com)
Category: Google

Google is back with a social search experiment. This time they call it SearchWiki. A collective feature “ala” Digg to promote search results, add public comments to them, remove them, and suggest what you would like to see the next time you perform your search. The new feature lets you see others’ comments for your particular SearchWiki as well as your previous notes.

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from iBrian 246 days ago #

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Ouch - sounds like a great way to push bias into the results.

Considering the extent of support for Ron Paul on a number of social media sites, if Google were to take this as a signal for inclusion in general search, the result could be unwelcome. :)

While I'm sure Google's happy to use any user signal where constructive, the trouble with taking a democratic approach is organised bias trying to control the system. At present Google only has to worry about individual SEO's trying to influence results in different ways - imagine a huge swathe of the internet trying to do it all in one direction? :)

from NickWilsdon 246 days ago #

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@iBrian

Matt Cutts answered this one over at the Google System blog:

And just to dispel one more misconception that I saw a few people speculate on: if user A edits their search results, it doesn't affect the search results for user B.

There is an option for users to go check out notes left by other users, but that requires additional explicit work--by default, users don't see other users' notes. And even if you do the work to see other users' notes, other users' changes don't affect your search rankings.

So this purely modifies your own search results rankings. So if you spam the rankings, you're only spamming the rankings for yourself. ;)

Of course, that then leaves the question, why would anyone use this function? (glorified bookmarks?). You'd need a fairly serious OCD to want to reorder all your favourite search results rather than just redefining your query.

from NickWilsdon 246 days ago #

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@ChrisLang

This has been discussed no end but I don't think personalised results are the "end of SEO".

1) Not everyone will be logged in - there will still be a 'default' index.
2) Optimised titles and meta are always going to have a place in an information retrival system, if only to pursuade the user to click on the SERP listing or green light it in their searchwiki.
3) We'll still be working on conversions for our clients
4) Hard to imagine they will change the link based algo (if you consider SEO link building), at least it's far more likely personalised search will be implimented before that changes.
5) We will still need to be making content accessible to the search engine spiders and optimising databases.

Lots more reasons why we'll still be doing SEO for some time yet, don't worry :)

from iBrian 245 days ago #

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@Nick

"if user A edits their search results, it doesn't affect the search results for user B."

Indeed - but user A is certainly providing a signal Google could process.

I'm not particularly worried about personalisation, but I would be worried if Google wanted to introduce any element of "democratic" voting in search algos - not least because that could make Google Bombs of the past look like small fry in future campaign movements. :)

from NickWilsdon 245 days ago #

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@iBrian Although having the social media "anti-corporate" crowd organising the SERPs would ultimately push all the businesses and money to Adwords ;)

from alex888 244 days ago #

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It is great to know that google is doing some social work. i would like to join this community.

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alex
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