Google Launches SearchWiki

We have recently seen the launch of SearchWiki by Google which allows you to edit your search results. The aim of this article is to look at the way in which SearchWiki works and how this will affect the way you search and also how this can affect SEO.

How Does SearchWiki Work?

If you are logged into Google and search you will automatically see some extra icons around each or the search results. These will be:

1. An up arrow. This will allow you to increase the ranking of a web page in your search results.
2. A cross. This will allow you to delete a result from your search results however they will still appear at the bottom of your page.
3. A speech bubble. This will allow you to make comments on a web page that will be public to other users.

When you promote or delete a website you can see how many other people promoted or deleted that website. You will also be able to view all of the comments made by other searchers on a particular web page.

If you make the same or similar search again you will then have altered search results based on the changes you made the last time you searched. This clearly gives you a lot more ability to personalise the results that you see and to get rid of results that are not helpful.

One other thing to consider is that if you search for something you and the website you want does not appear you will be able to "Add a Result". This means that next time you search for the same term you will make sure you get the sites that you want to show.

Advantages of SearchWiki

There are a few advantages to using SearchWiki and below are the main ones:

1. If you search for something on a regular basis, like "Weather" you will be able to adjust the results to ensure you get the sites that you want which will help you to save time.

2. You will no longer need to use social bookmarking sites and can utilise SearchWiki to save your favourite results.

3. If you are searching for something new you will be able to view comments from other people and get some useful advice on websites. Beware of spam comments.

Disadvantages of SearchWiki

As well as a list of advantages, there are also some disadvantages to SearchWiki that may affect the usage of it. Below is a list of the main ones:

1. It adds a lot of clutter to your search results. So if you don’t want to use it you will have symbols and extra bits that just act as noise and make it harder to look at the search results.

2. The changes that you make are only available if you make the same search and will not affect the sites you have changed is you make a different query. So if you want to use it instead of bookmarking sites you will need to remember what you searched for.

3. You can only make public comments. It might be useful to be allowed to make private comments so that you can easily see what you think of a website.

4. You cannot change between your altered results and the standard results. After a certain length of time things might have changes and you want to get new options. The only way to do this is to log out, but then you will not be able to change things again.

5. You cannot properly reorder results. You can only put sites at the top of delete them. It would be a great idea if the user could put the results in the exact order they want.

What does SearchWiki mean for SEO

At the moment the main difference will come where people alter their results. You will not be able to tell what changes people have made and so it will be much harder to predict where a site will appear in the results. However at the moment SearchWiki will not affect the ranking of a website if people are not logged into their Google account. The following comments have been made by Cedric Dupont, the product manager for SearchWiki, "Search is adapting to the Internet as it becomes a more participatory medium. Now you have people telling us specific things about how they'd like to see their search results. You could imagine if we do see a particular site (about which) people have a unanimous opinion, that might trigger external things. Like maybe we should check out our spam control,".

This does mean that it is important to be aware that in the future Google may decide to use the changes that are made to websites as a ranking factor. This will make life much harder for SEO and will put more emphasis on making sure your website is full of relevant content that people actually want to use. The chance of a spam site getting to the top of the rankings will be a lot lower and the quality of results returned will be improved which is after all what Google is all about.

Article Source: http://www.wahm-articles.com

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