Customize Your Google Searches with SearchWiki

Posted 11/28/2008 at 9:00am | by Mark Edward Soper

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If you've been resisting getting a Google account, you might not be able to resist this one: set up a Google account and you can use Google's new SearchWiki to customize your search results.

When you use Google after signing in, the normal Google search results include three new icons next to each listing that customize your personalized search results:

• Click the Up-arrow (Promote) button to move the search result to the top of your results
• Click the X (Remove) button to delete the result
• Click the Comment bubble to attach a note for the result

At the bottom of each search page, you have these additional options:

• Add a result: type in the URL for a site you want to add to your search result
• See all my SearchWiki notes: displays all the comments you've added
• See all notes for this SearchWiki: displays all comments added to the search results by all users
• Learn more: opens the SearchWiki answer page

SearchWiki is intended to give you the ability to fine-tune your search results and eliminate irrelevant or obsolete results. However, critics have noted some significant problems with SearchWiki, including:

Privacy flaws: You can't make your SearchWiki notes private and if your user name identifies you, everyone will know what you like. You can change your user name, but the damage to your privacy might already have happened.

Usability flaws: You must scroll to the bottom of the search page to see SearchWiki comments, and you might not find other users' comments all that useful.

Potential end of Search Engine Optimization (SEO): What will happen to strategies for getting pages to the first page of a search engine? Some critics view SearchWiki as a threat to SEO, while others don't.

Have you tried SearchWiki yet? Hit Comment and tell us what you think about it.