Google Digg-Style Experiment
Search November 28th, 2007 - By Haochi
Google Experimental is currently running an experiment that allows some selected users to “influence [the] search experience by adding, moving, and removing search results.”
On a result page, you can choose move a search result to the top by clicking on the up-arrow corresponding result, which will be marked by an orange asterisk next time you search for the same keywords. Similarly, if you don’t like the page, you can hide it in future searches for the same keywords by clicking on the X button next to the title of the result, as shown in the above screenshot. Part of this experiment also includes the “Suggest a better page” feature I posted awhile ago.
One downside about this is that why would someone go back to the results page if s/he already on a page that s/he is satisfy with? (I personally open results in new tabs, I am just referring to people in general.)
[via Jessamyn West on Flickr]
November 28th, 2007 at 8:30 pm
Is it available in Google Experimental? I can’t find this.
November 28th, 2007 at 8:41 pm
How do you enroll in it? Using Google.com.
November 28th, 2007 at 9:17 pm
Google might be just picking random people for this experiment, I can’t find any page to join it.
November 29th, 2007 at 7:53 am
Its definitely something good and I think google will make use of the votes to refine their SERP.
November 29th, 2007 at 8:39 am
wow , Google going to make search engine games harder for webmasters . This is ridiculous.
November 29th, 2007 at 9:36 am
Collaborative Filtering on the loose again. I’m not surprised at all that Google is heading in this direction. In the domain of influence one of the most powerful principles is “social proof” - whereby we look to what similar others are doing for guidance in making our decisions. We will be seeing more of this.
November 29th, 2007 at 9:47 am
This could be used in wrong way too. Its like earlier they put importance on the link juice and that failed as people bought links. Now if G puts importance on the digg style behavior, then this would lead to people conglomerating together and manipulating the results. I think this would lead to more devastating results.
November 29th, 2007 at 10:55 am
Hopefully the selected users are fully evaluated first. There is already a “click fraud” problem with sponsored listing and to me, this may create the same problem for organic listings.
November 29th, 2007 at 11:05 am
You’re missing the point… they’re not abandoning link juice (page rank), or keywords, or link text… the idea is to include all these factors, and more and balance them all so the system is near impossible to game.
November 29th, 2007 at 3:16 pm
This is very intriguing. SEO is a moving target for both content authors and service providers. Integrating content from users, in the form of feedback, is valuable, but I think there’s another direction.
What is user-feedback was mashed up with a users social network? SEO is completely transformed.
November 29th, 2007 at 5:21 pm
@6, Heath
Heath I couldn’t agree more. I have been working on a social search site like that for a while now.
It is still in closed beta but I’m building a search index to work hand in hand with search engines like Google and Yahoo to increase search relevancy - particularly enhancing subjective search topics that are the major weakness of traditional keyword searching.
—-
[removed signature URL, to go to the David's website, click on his name - Haochi]
December 2nd, 2007 at 3:13 am
I am not sure who has been targeted for this experiment or if it is only valid once you have logged into your igoogle, or even if it has any effect of the “real” esarch results. Do you really think that Google is going to let everyody ruin the cash cow ?
Dream on, this is just another form of improving the relevence of search results to a higher level, and also to allow people to “mark” smaller important sites that do not have enough content to make it to the 1st or 2nd page. Think about it, today only big… sorry HUGE sites are on the 1st page. What about the smaller, sometime more relevent sites that Google has a hard time ranking propery ?
Don’t worry, Goold know who we are, where we have surfed and what sites we own so they will have no problem in making such a feature work without seo spam.
December 3rd, 2007 at 6:23 pm
This seems like it has high abuse potential. Anyone who can program their way past a captcha (most of the time not that hard) will have unprecedented control over PageRank.
Danger Will Robinson.
June 2nd, 2008 at 5:13 pm
Is this still available?
July 2nd, 2008 at 2:50 am
This is very worrying for webmasters.
July 2nd, 2008 at 5:56 pm
I continue to be involved in many volunteer activities. The organizations I am working with very much appreciate any support they receive - whether it be monetary or individual’s time. Thanks
July 22nd, 2008 at 10:43 pm
a;sonf asdfofnsdf sldkfnsdfs fnkdl jjfk fn mfdis mfd.sdfm