Google's SearchWiki
January 30, 2008 Author: Adam Lee
The launch of Google’s Searchwiki caused a buzz within the online community but I feel many jumped on the bandwagon too quickly. My immediate thought was why would anyone use it?
The only result I could come up with was because you want to improve your own, or your clients rankings, therefore creating a huge bias in the search results.
The idea of a search engine is to find the relevant results, if you are telling it the results then why use a search engine?
Google states the Searchwiki interface will have no impact on the traditional results but the data Google will collect through Searchwiki will help Google to develop their algorithms, but due to the amount of bias that will be in this data it will only result in further problems within Google’s search results.
I asked my brother if he would use Searchwiki and he didn’t even notice it was there! When I explained what it was he said ‘what the hell would I use that for?’
An SERoundtable poll asking if the public is ready for Searchwiki resulted in 83% saying no.
From an SEO point of view, I think the old algorithms are still far more important than Searchwiki and will continue to be for a considerable time yet.
It’s not all bad though, one thing Searchwiki can help Google with is identifying spam sites. For instance if a lot of users remove a result or give it negative comments it can help Google prioritise which sites to look at and determine whether they should be in the search results. This is obviously a big problem for Google lately and any help they can get with this will benefit them.
However, Google tries to develop algorithms to make spamming the engine more difficult. If Searchwiki becomes part of the ranking algorithm then it is only a matter of time before companies pop up offering services to vote up and comment on your sites and vote down and negatively comment on your competitors sites. All it takes is a few hundred Google accounts and let’s face it, a proxy server and a bit of time can get anyone 10-20 accounts!
3 Responses to “Google's SearchWiki”
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December 1st, 2008 at 5:10 pm
It is definitely going to be interesting to see how it pans out. As a user I wouldn’t want to manipulate my own results. I use a search engine so that I can find sites that may be of interest to me – telling Google what I want to see kind of defeats the purpose of it.
Having said, my experience of it so far has been pretty hit and miss. Sometimes I can alter my results and it works fine and other times it doesn’t seem to do anything. I think the user interface needs a bit of work done to it.
Do you know if the comments are moderated in any way? From what I have seen so far it doesn’t appear to be. Do you think this will have a major impact on brand reputation?
December 1st, 2008 at 5:19 pm
It doesn’t seem to be moderated.
If you look at the comments for McDonald’s you get an idea of:
a)How easy it is to spam this
b)How long will it take before the legal implications affect Google!
I appreciate there are a lot of sites out there that say McDonalds are shit but pretty sure McDonalds aren’t paying them a shit load of money to advertise on them. Wonder how long it will be before sites like McDonalds threaten to pull their PPC spend it Google don’t remove these sort of comments?
December 1st, 2008 at 5:58 pm
‘this food is really shit. can I say that here’ – I love that. Even the person leaving the comment can’t quite believe that they can get away with it!