Google uses User Voting and Comments to effect ranking

I have just noticed a new (I believe) feature in Google search when logged into an account.

Next to each listings title in a SERP there is an up arrow and an X. The up arrow indicates that you promote the site and the X removes it from your SERPs page.

If you do another search the removed listing does not show up.
You can also comment publically on the site.

I would well imagine that this data will be factored into the search algorithm.

Google already uses user behaviour to help rank sites.

Has anyone else seen this before?

I think it would be good to set up a test for this.

I have yet to find an SEO Chat thread that is relevant to the industry that we could use as a test page.

Does anyone have a suggested SEO Chat thread that ranks on the second page we could use as a test for this?

If you logout of your google account you will see that the search results are back to the way they were originally. Although google may be trying to figure out how to use the data they get from people voting sites up or down in their personal search results, if they did use that data then the next logical step for SEO's would be to hire a bunch of mturks to create accounts and to delete their competitors and vote for their sites. Surely google won't make it that easy for SEOs!

Nicole

Personally I think the personlised search features in google are unlikley to be used in the general results. This sort of defeats the whole personlised search results idea. The problem would be the only people to really use this feature would be people trying to improve their own site.

I think personlsed search results in the end will not really take off until the personlised serach algo can profile a user and give back profilled results. I also think that this on the whole will not actually improve google. The idea of profilling users to anticipate what they were actually searching for and order results accordingly to me implies a fairly low opinion of indivudual users to use refined searches to get the desired results.

Good luck on your experiment but my guess would be zero effect on the main index results...

Did someone missed this one? Thats Called Search Wiki

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/searchwiki-make-search-your-own.html

That does nothing but customize your own SERPS and keep them for future reference.. This will, no matter how, impact the SERPS..Not!

Just another handy tool other than "Note This" Feature..