Comments on: Google SearchWiki: An Interesting Take on PIM

By: Social Utility, +/- 25%

Social Utility, +/- 25% — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 04:19:55 +0000

[...] course, Google also wants to know what you like. That’s why Google developed SearchWiki (RIP), Hotpot (now merged into Places), and most recently +1. As Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, and [...]

By: Life, the Universe, and SEO Revisited

Life, the Universe, and SEO Revisited — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 19:47:23 +0000

[...] personal site blocklists that are reported to Google. Some may see this is as a reincarnation of SearchWiki, an ill-conceived and short-lived feature that allowed searchers to annotate and re-order results. [...]

By: Google Improves Personalization | The Noisy Channel

Google Improves Personalization | The Noisy Channel — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 01:57:02 +0000

[...] regular readers know, I have little love for SearchWiki. But Preferred Sites seems to be a real step, albeit a small one, towards allowing users to [...]

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 14:11:21 +0000

Milan: great, SearchWiki as a platform for terrorists–that will endear Google to the feds! But, in fairness, there are already many ways to distribute secret messages, e.g., though comment threads on popular blogs.

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 14:07:51 +0000

Sérgio, that is perhaps the only potential value I see in SearchWiki. It reminds me of the better relevance through user diversity discussion I had with Amit:

http://thenoisychannel.com/2008/04/08/qa-with-amit-singhal-2/

But there are much better ways to deliver it. As a means of allowing users to personalize search, editing individual query results almost as if they were static is pretty inefficient. Why not give users wholesale control over ranking?

By: Sérgio Nunes

Sérgio Nunes — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 13:59:53 +0000

I think that Google’s SearchWiki might also be seen as an attempt to fight “bad SEO” (aka spammers). By “personalizing” each search result you no longer have a single top result for a given search query. This makes it harder to execute and evaluate SEO techniques. Thus devaluing SEO strategies.

SearchWiki definitely adds a layer of complexity to SEO.

By: Milan

Milan — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 13:34:52 +0000

There’s also a followup analysis from Lauren Weinstein discussing use of SearchWiki as a covert communications channel.

http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000476.html

By: Focused Comment Spamming | The Noisy Channel

Focused Comment Spamming | The Noisy Channel — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 15:34:49 +0000

[...] Normally I take down spam commenters. But a recent comment spammer posting with the name “lively” (claiming the unlilkely email address of lively@gmail.com) struck me as interesting enough to to leave as an example to readers. You can see the comment here. [...]

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 15:18:29 +0000

First off, I have to wonder at user named “lively” claiming an email address of the same at Gmail and promoting a site whose domain name seems designed to capitalize on Google’s recent SearchWiki announcement.

To clarify for readers, the Google SearchWiki feature is available to all signed-in Google users at this point–just use Google normally and you’ll see it. And Google has made it clear that the changes that you make to your own results will have *no* effect on others’ results

Do I think it will take off? No.

By: lively

lively — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 12:10:33 +0000

I am recieving the google feature where i am located (mid west usa) but im not sure if all googlers are able to see the google searchwiki showing up on their screens yet. If not there is a video and some screen shots of the searchwiki at http://www.thesearchwiki.com do you guys think this will take off? do you think it will effect the search engine search results drastically from now on?

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 13:52:05 +0000

Lauren Weinstein suggests that the ability to view the comments that all other users have associated with search results may lead to dueling comments over popular search results.

http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000473.html

If Lauren’s concerns bear out, the results make SearchWiki something of a Wiki 0.0 — a slew of scattered comments.