Google changes search and raises questions

Google has made one of the most drastic changes to search since they first started out. It's now possible to start rearranging and commenting on results that come up in your searches. Actually, it's not quite that drastic, since you have to be logged into Google with your Google account, and when you rearrange search results it's only you that will see them. However, you can also comment on results and these will be public.

Let me run you through the changes. Firstly, if you're not signed into your account, nothing different occurs. If you are, and you run a search you get to see a bunch of new stuff:

See the little icons to the right of the results? If you click the up arrow the result gets pushed to the top of the screen. The cross symbol removes the result. On the right next to 'similar pages' is a comment symbol, and you can make a comment - you can see mine below the O'Reilly result.

Now, down at the bottom of the page there are other differences:

If you want to add a particular result into a search you can add a result, you can see all your notes, or you can see all of the public notes for the SearchWiki. If you do that, you then see something like this, for the TechCrunch site:

Interestingly however, although there are 144 comments I can only see 10 of them. I'm not sure yet if this is a default, or that's all you get - I'm still playing around. Obviously as you can see, you can decide to vote up a comment or vote it down.

All of this leads me to wonder 'Why?' A word of warning here - if you go down this route and start moving and commenting you cannot go back - you're stuck with this change for good. Anyway, I'm still wondering how best to use this. If I've done a search and found a really good site I'm going to use it (and I may just want it the once), or I'll bookmark it if I want to go back to it again. I don't really see much point in pushing something up to the top of the results, particularly since I'm the only person who will see the changes.

I could make comments, but I've got various other options for doing that, such as the Google notepad. True, making public comments can be useful, but we're getting into an interesting area - although I'm vaguely identified and choose to be so by my name, if someone goes by the name 'FredJones' it's not going to be easy to trace them - and you may well want to, if they make comments that are unacceptable. What if the comments are incorrect, rude or downright obscene? You can alert Google to comments that you think are inappropriate and Google will take a look at them. What if they don't agree with you? Is there anything you can do about it? In my opinion this is giving Google a whole new level of power that I'm really not happy with at all. What rights does the owner of the website have? I've not yet seen any answers to these questions, and it really makes me think that Google has jumped into doing this a little bit too quickly, and I wonder if we're going to see a Lively like retreat a few months down the line.

Comments

[KMB]

"I don't really see much point in pushing something up to the top of the results, particularly since I'm the only person who will see the changes."

Why are you so sure, that you are the only one affected by this? It's obvious, that other won't get the pushed entry as their first one, but I wouldn't say that Google is unable to use this kind of "human" rank.

"if you go down this route and start moving and commenting you cannot go back - you're stuck with this change for good."

It's not hard to pull back. Just do it step by step. First remove all comments that are not your own, next step, remove even those comments. People will notice, but don't care too much.

I think the comments and pushing/pulling are a step to get a bit more "social" (not especially "networky") and to add a human touch to the search results.

[Phil Bradley]

It's certainly possible that Google will use human voting in the longer run to change the results. In which case it's a system that's going to be rife with link farms turning into voting farms messing up results even more. So I'm not sure it's a sensible choice on their part if they go down that route.

No, you *can't* pull back - if you choose to comment/vote you can't remove that option from your search settings. You can remove your comments etc, but you're still locked into that system. Or you were until they pulled it earlier this evening.

[Martin Belam]

"I wonder if we're going to see a Lively like retreat a few months down the line."

Or even in just a couple of days!

[Soap Nuts Laundry Detergent]

I don't like the changes. I like to see where my webpages are in the rankings, rather than where I want them to be.

[Opinions galore]

Is this the precursor to the new social search idea? Maybe Google will take some of these ideas and filter them in to their search algorithms. Spammers and scammers could take advantage of this, though, and like clock work use multiple logins to push their sites to the top.