Google's personalised searching changes have taken a new twist with the release of Search Wiki, as is being widely reported at the moment including on Google's own blog.

Rather than Google deciding how to personalise results for you, when signed in, you can now remove and move around the placements of the search engine results - and then next time you search for the same phrase, the order that you gave results will be remembered and served back to you.

Google are stressing that this data isn't going to be used to determine standard placements - they say "The changes you make only affect your own searches" - but it will be interesting to see if they use this data in the future to help
quality assure the results that they serve for particular keyword searches.

When you look at a SERP when signed in, there are a number of new elements that you wouldnt have seen until now:

I've marked the new buttons with numbers, and these perform the following functions

1. You can use this button to move the position of the current listing

2. You can use this to remove this listing from the results page that you see

3. In this area you can make notes about the page/SERP

Now whenever I search for "search engine optimisation", Vertical Leap are going to appear in position 1 for this phrase! If only the real SEO of the site was this simple!