Thursday, November 29, 2007

Google offering customizable search results

Via Greg Gershman we learn that Google is experimenting with a voting feature on search results that allows users to vote up or bury search results they see.

Presumably if this reached critical mass it would alter overall search results. Expect politicians to be the first to use this feature in an organized way. If that works for them it will work for the rest of us.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

from what I can see, the votes are only correlated to you personally, not fed back into the system (if they were...that would be a disaster for google, as it would be a dirt simple way to manipulate their results).

My point in the twitter was that TechCrunch was calling it "digg-like" when there really is nothing "digg-like" about it. digg is social voting, you vote affects what others see; in this case your vote only affects you.

Alice said...

Clearly this feature is intended to affect that users results. But surely if a Presidential candidate asked their supporters to highlight certain results and burying others, it would have an impact on overall results, similar to Google bombs.

My point was for the rest of us to stand aside, let the politicians slug it out, and see what works.