Google Tests Custom Highlights, Comments In Search

Ian Lamont writes "Google is testing functionality that lets users tinker with query results by re-ranking them and commenting on them. The reason for the commenting feature: 'We're just curious to see how it will be used,' according to a Google engineer quoted in the article. The company has posted screenshots of some of the experiments, which also involve highlighting certain results as well as stems and synonyms within results. Google declined to answer any questions about the experiments, and it's not known whether Google would factor the rearranging of results by users into the overall computation for ranking results for those specific queries. It's also not clear whether search result comments would be made available to anyone to read."

Comments

As an interesting note...

[Spy der Mann]

If you happen to have a blog or website and google it, you'll probably find it placed in a search-magnet - you know, those sites that collect text from the most random webpages and contain no links at all, but later become frontends for sales websites.

I hate those. Hopefully I can mod them down with this new google feature.