Google has officially launched what it calls SearchWiki which lets logged in users to rearrange their search results. Google’s official blog states:
Today we’re launching SearchWiki, a way for you to customize search by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results. With just a single click you can move the results you like to the top or add a new site. You can also write notes attached to a particular site and remove results that you don’t feel belong. These modifications will be shown to you every time you do the same search in the future. SearchWiki is available to signed-in Google users. We store your changes in your Google Account. If you are wondering if you are signed in, you can always check by noting if your username appears in the upper right-hand side of the page.
The changes you make only affect your own searches. But SearchWiki also is a great way to share your insights with other searchers. You can see how the community has collectively edited the search results by clicking on the “See all notes for this SearchWiki” link.
Here’s a Youtube video from Google that shows how you can make use of the SearchWiki feature:
Ok fine, different sorts of people live in this world, and while I would not like to rearrange my search results and send it out to my friends, some might. I would also not like to waste my time commenting on search results, but again, there’re people different that me whom I share the same world and the same search engine with, who would want to do that. However, I really would love to tell Google what I was expecting when I was searching a particular keyphrase at Google, specially when I get weird results after submitting a long query for which Google shows some bullshit results and I am happy SearchWiki would let me communicate better with Google (if there would be someone at the other end to listen to me 
).
Did you mark the sentence in bold in the quoted text taken from Google’s blog above? Google says “The changes you make only affect your own searches“. May be that’s true for now because Google still hasn’t collected enough data from its users so that it can incorporate it into its ranking algorithm, but what about say after 6 months or so. May be, Big G would want to use it. “May be” and only “May be” because I don’t know what Google would do. Experts need to carry various hit and trial experiments to find out what Google is doing right now and by no means I am an expert and I cannot say with even 0.(millions of zeros)0001% certainty what would Google do in the coming future.
I would want to present a scenario of what would happen if Google incorporates data from SearchWiki into its ranking algorithm. In the age where site owners, bloggers and webmasters fight a new war against each other every minute to stay on top of the Google hill, letting people see what others commented and letting users push web sites up and down the rankings would mean knocking the doors of spammers. As you would need a substantial amount of votes to change the rankings of a web site then, Google commentators might be hired just like Diggers are hired now. But as Google only lets people who are logged in to use this feature, may be Google wants to find out who are the ones spamming. May be Google would record the IPs of the persons commenting and find out what Gmail addresses they hold. May be commenting more than 100 times in a month would raise Google’s eyebrows then. You never know what Big G is up to. May be a day would come where votes from certain authoritative email addresses on the web would help you climb up the Google hill just like how links from authoritative sites help you right now and the other way round would also be true then. You cannot pay an authoritative blogger right now to link badly to your competitor’s blog and oust him from the competition but in the future you might be able to pay someone to vote your competitor down for a particular keyword.
What do you think Google plans to use SearchWiki for? Let’s discuss about this because SEO would not be the same if Google decides to use data from SearchWiki in its ranking algorithm, what do you say?
