Since its launch a few weeks ago, the SearchWiki has baffled a number of my customers and even a couple of people in the office, who didn’t catch my first blog on SearchWiki.
Whilst I saw about this on the day it launched, for the general searching population, the SearchWiki was added without much explanation or fanfare. Currently when you are signed in to a Google Account and you search for a phrase, next to the title of the SERP are 2 new buttons – 1 which pushes a listing up the page, and another to remove a listing from the results.
There is also another little icon that you can use to leave notes about the page of that particular listing, and a new option added to the bottom of the page where you can "add a result" and enter the URL of the page that you want to appear here.
Google have got some help resources about the SearchWiki, which I found on another blog on the subject, but the link to this is currently tucked at the bottom of the results page, and perhaps isnt all that easily found.
At the moment, when you are signed in, the SearchWiki is there to be used whether you like it or not. You can ignore it, but at present there is no way to switch it off. Tech Crunch have been reporting that its likely that a button will be added to allow this to happen in the early months of 2009.
I think that this is a useful service for searchers, as it means when they do a repeat search on something that they have already searched for and changed, they will be greeted with pages that they have indicated that they want to see on that search. I don’t know for sure about the general population, but personally, if I wanted to re-visit a page in such a way I am far more likely to bookmark a result in my browser. However, this system will remember the pages that you like across different computers if you are signed in to your Google account.
Tech crunch also report on Marissa Mayer commenting that although data from the SearchWiki is not currently being used to determine ranking placement, if thousands of people remove a particular listing from the search results then this data may be used in to also remove this from the non SearchWiki results as well.
If this were to happen, not only will we have to ensure that a page is well optimised for a search engine, but that its also something that searchers are going to want to see (which we are always trying to do anyway to encourage the click through) – but if your listing is not popular amongst SearchWiki users, then you may lose a ranking that you have worked hard to achieve through your SEO work.
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