Google's new 'SearchWiki' feature
Just been grokking Google's launch of their SearchWiki enabled search results, in a collaborative review with Simon Wheatley.
This is a big deal, I think; Google acts as the de facto interface into the web for a lot of people and this new annotation functionality is available for everyone with a signed in Google account.
Google are v. focused on not adding clutter to their search interface, so anything that, by default, creates a visual hit on this is clearly a big deal for them, and not just an interesting Labs release.
First, the interface:
Any promotion, or demotion of results only affects search results tied to my account, so thankfully no clickfarm powered mass SEO opportunity here.
However, notes I make are universally available, and earns the wiki moniker, by creating a secondary click-through page that lists all results with their various comments.
As to be expected for a newly launched Google feature, I can only find a proliferation of bon mots for favourites such as Microsoft and of course, Apple:
Comments are tied to the results of a particular term, so someone searching for 'Apple problems' will see a different set of annotations for apple.com vs. apple.com in the results for 'Apple bargains'.
Comments might help place context on search results; particularly for results that have been successfully exploited. E.g. searching for product reviews is often dominated by affiliate sites masquerading as review sites...annotations warning of such issues might prove useful.
Although collective filtering of comments over time will increase their value, it gets more interesting when seeing how search results are augmented for current events and recent search trends. I popped over to Google Trends to test an emergent search term. Over the last few hours, this has been around Micheal Mukasey, the US Attorney General who collapsed during a press conference.
A Google search returns a Wikipedia page as the top hit, and that results had already been annotated with the news of his collapse:
By now, Google will have topped the search results with a news item (he's ok, btw), but this test is a more interesting example of how annotated results might become useful, particularly with more obscure terms.
Reviewing this with Mr Wheatley, we came to the conclusion that this would be really useful in the context of a shared workgroup, or company - where the promotion/demotion of links and notes are visible to that entire group. Simon thought this could be easily served up by matching the domain names of user's email/gmail-for-domain accounts.
An interesting development for Google...if I was a stock analyst, my recommendation on this feature would be, erm, 'hold'.
(Naturally, lots of discussion on Techmeme .)
