Google’s New SearchWiki – Valuable or Useless?

Tired of your favorite website showing up on the 2nd or 3rd page of Google? Starting Nov 20, 2008 Google has given you complete control over your own search results with the release of SearchWIki.

With SearchWiki you can:

Move sites that are displayed in search results up or down

Remove a result completely

Leave notes and comments on each result

And suggest new sites that don’t show up in the results or are buried too far to see

Users must be logged into their Google account to perform these actions and then will be able to review their changes and annotations when they enact the same search later.

Google has also made the decision to share people’s annotations publically, which will be accessible when you scroll to the bottom of any search page and click on “All notes for this SearchWiki”. It is not clear on how Google is going to police these annotations from the flood of false reviews, slander, and spam – which is already becoming apparent.

What Do You Think?

So how effective is Google’s new SearchWiki? Are you really going to enter the site via Google search engine, find the information you were searching for, and then hit the back button a few times just to move that site up in search rankings (just for you)? You don’t know how relevant the site is until you actually visit it, right? Seems like a lot of work when there are simpler ways of achieving this goal. I mean, why not just bookmark it?

So you decide, is Google’s SearchWiki a new valuable tool, or impractical and inadequate for most?

For someone in the trenches of the SEM world almost every day, trade shows such as SES are quite refreshing as well as overwhelming. I had attended SES San Jose once before in 2006 and it was quite interesting to see how the show, and the industry, has changed.

In 2006, Social Media was prevailing but not the powerhouse that it was this year. You couldn’t walk down a row of booths this year without hearing “promotion through social media channels” or “Viral Content” or “Improving link quality”. Learning more about Social Media Optimization (SMO) from several of the exhibitors really opened my eyes to how the industry is creating tools and techniques in order to tie a number to SMO initiatives. In the past, blogs had been viewed as an avenue for branding or internal communication but had never been associated with revenue driving marketing. All that has changed. It is becoming more and more common for analytics programs to report on social media efforts. All in all, it was quite exciting to see SMO case studies from Fortune 500 companies that are using blogs, wikis and other forms of social networking.

Again, Google went all out with the dance. What a party! They had the dancing, volleyball and tons of food just like back in 2006, but the Glow in the Dark theme this year made the night come alive.