Users that disagree with Google's search results can now do something about it.
Google's SearchWiki is a feature that lets users elevate, delete, add and annotate search results. Google remembers the changes that a user made to search results, so repeat searches will show the same customisations and notes.
Google has been offering SearchWiki as an experimental feature to some users for months, but, on Thursday, it became available to anybody who's searching while logged in with a Google account.
"This is a search feature that gets a user more control over their search results," said Cedric Dupont, Google's SearchWiki product manager.
There's also a collaborative element: people can show the collective wisdom of the masses by clicking a 'See all notes for this SearchWiki' link at the bottom of each search-results page. That shows notes and how people have promoted or deleted pages in aggregate.
Google isn't alone in its customisation work. With a research project called 'U Rank', Microsoft has been testing the user-tuned search results idea; Mahalo presents search results created by humans; and Wikia Search, an open-source search engine, is open to user suggestions. "Today, search undervalues the human touch", argues Wikia Search.
Feedback for ordinary search?
Google will use people's voting behaviour as an input to the standard search algorithm that determines the order of search results. Google already employs human judgement in its algorithm by virtue of its PageRank technique, which judges a website's merit in part on how many other websites link to it, but people promoting or deleting specific web addresses could be another signal.
Dupont was non-committal about whether the company plans to build in that feedback loop, either directly as a signal to influence search rankings or indirectly as extra data that could help the company judge the relevance of its search results. But he certainly didn't rule the idea out.
"We don't close any doors. We constantly evaluate signals [that are incorporated into the search results algorithm]. Search is adapting to the internet as it becomes a more participatory medium. Now you have people telling us specific things about how they'd like to see their search results," said Dupont.
Certainly, people's collective behaviour could be useful. For example, Dupont said: "You could imagine if we do see a particular site [about which] people have a unanimous opinion — that might trigger external things. Like maybe we should check out our spam control." In other words, if a lot of people deleted a particular page from search results, perhaps Google should check why its system isn't flagging that page as a problem.
Another narrower possibility could be to use SearchWiki customisations to influence the personalised search results people can get through Google by signing up for the Web History feature. Dupont seemed cooler on this idea.
With SearchWiki, Dupont said, Google produces "customised search results in a very granular and precise manner", adjusting only specific web addresses and not broad influencers on search results. "At this point, we don't have anything to say about how to combine these two features."
