Slashdot Mirror
Google Turns On User-Tweakable Search Wiki
Barence writes "Google has launched a new service that allows users to tailor to their own search results. Called SearchWiki, the service allows Google account holders to move results up or off the rankings, or even add their own choice of site to the top of the search results. Google claims that any changes a user makes will only affect their results, and not those of fellow surfers, although it's difficult to believe that some of the feedback generated from the SearchWiki won't be used to fine tune the Google search algorithm. Is this a cunning way to encourage people to sign in while they search, thus providing Google with a richer set of data that can be mapped to specific user accounts?"
If they didn't limit this to the single user, then Google bombing would be even more effective. I suppose they can still use negative votes for spam research.
> Is this a cunning way to encourage people to sign in while they search, thus providing Google
> with a richer set of data that can be mapped to specific user accounts?"
Sounds like one of those people who surf with cookies disabled.
This seems to just be a way to refine search results and collect more specified data. This is great for Google's aims of collecting all the data in the universe, but an annoying "feature" for me.
I really dislike the "refined" searches, especially as Google's memory lasts for a long time. If I am doing a project on something, or am really interested in a topic (lets say travelling to Timbuktu), I will search it to death. However, a week later, when I am trying to search for something else (say used cars), I have to slog through a bunch of pages about car sales in Timbuktu!
Sigh.
Unity in Diversity
Why do they rank so high anyway?
Why would users put results to the top if there is no way of sharing those? It's not like users search for the same stuff every time in order to visit the same site that always happens to be on page 2 or something. ou could just bookmark that page.
Will people really use this at the slight chance that Google might one day use the information to improve their engine, even so they say that they won't?
User-tweakable SearchWiki... one might as well just use Wikipedia. I guess for 95% of all common searchterms, there is an informative Wiki-article anyway and those already have related peer-reviewed links at the bottom, excluding scam and parking sites. There is a good reason that most queries on Google provide Wikipedia as the first result.
Edit: sounds a bit more "flamebatish" than I wanted it to be but whatever.
Edit2: Yes, I can edit my comments, don't you?
They adopted (or will be adopting) a core principle of Wikia Search, and that is user generated content (and ranking search results is some kind of content). On Wikia, everyone can change search results, insert new links and delete them.
However, user generated content needs a community (in this case mainly to prevent or revert spamming) - and google had many unsuccessful community projects in the past... I wonder if they are foolish enough to try it again.
When it comes to community projects many people object to the idea of working for free towards another one's gain. That's why nonprofits like the Free Software Foundation (GNU project) and the Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia) are so successful at building high quality producing communities. I don't think that google has a chance here.
which presumably will delete all your data.
Ahhhhhhahahahhahahaaaaa!
You really shouldn't talk about your spouse that way.
I found a post on this blog that notes a greasemonkey script to hide the searchwikified results, as well as a link to a google groups thread that shows a url tweak that will skip the feature in your searches (and can be used to make your iGoogle homepage searchwiki free).
...but who tagged this "itsatarp"?
Three words: User Relevance Feedback.
In 1986 I started work on the first commercial search engine that supported "similarity searching." This was based on the Cosine Coefficient of weighted attribute vectors. As we got deeper and deeper into what made one search successful and another a flop, it became obvious that there were two prime enemies of successful searching.
For example, a query of "man versus machine" (actually run by Esther Dyson in our offices), produced an apparently random mix of articles about chess-playing computers, labor strikes over factory automation, and some guy towing a locomotive with his teeth (it's been over 20 years, so I don't remember the exact results). She hesitated for a moment, then said, "Oh! They really are all about people and machines, but how do I narrow it down to what I meant, which was more along the lines of the labor articles?"
We already had an answer to this by the time she visited us. Our solution (based on the work of Salton and Buckley) was to allow the user to say, "Results 1 and 3 are irrelevant, but result 2 is highly relevant." We would then take the attribute vectors for the articles and raise or lower the importance of those terms in the new query vector. After the first round of relevance feedback, the results often got downright spooky. Why? Because a) we now had a lot more terms to work with, and b) the additional terms helped to disambiguate terms like "bank." E.g., mention of levee construction probably meant this was a "river bank" and not a financial institution.
What does this have to do with what Google is doing? By reordering your results you are, in effect, giving user relevance feedback. I don't know what they are going to do with this information, but just getting your hands on it is a very important first step. And having you bring things to the top is doubly important, because positive relevance feedback is several times more important than negative. E.g. Tell me to drive towards San Francisco, rather than just saying I should leave Chicago.
On the downside, as mentioned by several previous posters, this opens the door to deep understanding of the user and what s/he is interest in. (Of course, they already get some of this when you click on items in a result list. They have a little JavaScript goody that records each and every click. Fortunately, there are GreaseMonkey scripts to disable this "feature.") One of my (few) customers back in the 80's and 90's said, "If you know only the questions I ask, you know too much." The customer? The NSA.
I tend to think of individual search personalization as a pain. It's another piece of state the user has to manage. But it's harmless, and some people might like it.
The trouble with sharing information about search results is that the most interested parties are, inevitably, going to be in the "search engine optimization" business. Unless Google figures out some way to prevent people from establishing huge numbers of accounts, something they've dramatically failed to do with GMail, any shared information from users will be gamed and spammed.
Does anybody use Wikia search? Unfortunately, because it's folded into Wikia.com, (the fan site wiki hosting service), Alexa doesn't produce useful stats. Wikia in total has about 10% of the traffic of "ask.com", and under 1% of Google.com. Wikia's trend is downward.
"Is this a cunning way to encourage people to sign in while they search, thus providing Google with a richer set of data that can be mapped to specific user accounts?"
Of course it is. But as a Google fangirl with no sense of privacy, I have to say, is this really a bad thing? Greater knowledge about their users will lead to more accurately targeted adverts. Is it such a bad thing that Google are increasing their potential earnings?
Google get more money, advertisers get more potential customers, and publishers get more money from adverts, and the customers get pointed to more sites they're likely to be interested in. Who loses?
I'm a leaf on the wind, watch how I soar...
-Lucy-
Firefox 3 adds support for tagging bookmarks
Epiphany has this for ages now.
The CustomizeGoogle Firefox addon allows you to filter search results like experts-exchange.com with wildcard expressions. Besides that, the addon can rewrite some of Google's pages to achieve, for example:
- Rewrite image search results to point directly to the images
- Remove ads
- Permanently set search preferences without having to log into your Google account. The addon stores the settings on the client's side and rewrites all HTTP GET requests to Google with the proper parameters.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/743