We have had a quite a few questions from our clients about the new “Search Wiki” services launched by Google this week and thought we would summarise our thoughts…

our thoughts

Essentially the service allow those users logged into Google to move their favorite listings for individual search phrases to the top or bottom of their search results.

Yes this is only for their own benefit and other users simply see the existing set of optimized listings until they are logged in and start moving their own listings around.

The other feature is the ability to post comments about listings – these are visible to others logged in should they wish to read them and users can only comment when logged in.

So what’s the point I hear you ask?

We think it is pretty useless and is likely to cause confusion rather than add any value to their search engine.  Currently users logged in to Google cannot choose to opt out of this service (they really ought to choose this type of thing) and once a listing has been promoted or demoted it is difficult to reverse this unless you just log out.

So why have Google introduced it?  

Well it is a feature of sorts that some may find useful?? Maybe? I don’t really know anyone who just uses Google to find sites they already know of – surely the idea is to find new sites that match your interest? Anyway yes it is a feature some users might want.  Also Google will surely be collating data about promoted/demoted sites and using in some way to either find new content to crawl or re-rank occasionally?  The latter is very worrying, as this type of thing is wide open to abuse and “Mr Average” Google user is very unlikely to use it anyway.

With a bit of luck Google will make this an “opt in” service rather than auto “opt in” service soon and stop the confusion, better still scrap it altogether.