Promote, Remove & Comment on Google search results

Noticed these this morning,

Once signed in you can zoom your site up to the top of the results so that they are there next time you search. Anyone else seeing them. Is it just an updated version of the "Note This" function?

I'm not sure what you mean explain please.

This just now appeared for me.

Next to every search result are two buttons, one "promote", one "remove", and then in the lower right a "comment" button.

I left a comment, and now it shows up as a supplemental text below the listing. I'll assume "remove" deletes it from my results completely, and that "promote" raises its placement.

Now the (literally) trillion dollar question: Is this a permanent feature, and will Google use this data to change the SERPS? If so, ...wow.

Okay, now I see that this feature is only enabled if I am signed in to my Google account. I signed out, and this feature disappeared.

So it's not as big a deal as I originally thought.

Also, I guess that the changes are stored locally and affect my SERPS only.

Don't know if the data is collected/analyzed by Google, or if it will change the overall public SERPS, but my guess is yes.

...I know that Google recently spoke of a more tailored user experience, but has everyone known about this thing for months and I was just ignorant? I wouldn't be surprised, of course, I don't exactly have my finger on the pulse of the SEO community.

It's the best feature ever! Sneak onto my boss' PC...promote all the client sites I'm working on, he comes in and checks the rankings *Bingo, bingo* Employee of the month award!

*taps nose*

I hope that we can use this to kick out all of the Wikipedia clones that clutter up search results with irrelevant information.

It's a tricky one, on the one hand Google would never normally ignore a chance to gather this sort of data but on the other it's pretty open to mischief & abuse.

From what I can see it is a way of customising your own search. If I remove a site from my serps it will still be there for everyone else. If not my competition are screwed as I just removed them from google.uk

I've noticed that Google will show you the total number of promotions for a specific site. Lets do a test here is my search query:

"Some Random Search"

I've promoted the "Engadget" site which showed 2nd for me in the list to top result. It now shows that it has 2 Promotions.

Link to search result: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=some+random+search&meta=

Yes that would be pretty funny. I'm sure that promote/delete only work for one's own search results. But hopefully, Google will take note of sites that get deleted from many people's search results and maybe they will have their software push those results further down.

As long as i dont employ a load of people to delete your site

These could certainly end up effecting rankings in a major way...

Google has always used people's clicks to improve the quality of search results, so the new options could influence the ranking algorithms in different ways. "At this time we aren't using SearchWiki to influence ranking but it is easy to see how that could happen in the future," said Marissa Mayer. "Search is adapting to the Internet as it becomes a more participatory medium. Now you have people telling us specific things about how they'd like to see their search results. You could imagine if we do see a particular site (about which) people have a unanimous opinion, that might trigger external things. Like maybe we should check out our spam control," suggested Cedric Dupont, product manager for SearchWiki and Google Knol.

It's important to remember that all the changes are saved to your Google account and they won't affect the search results for everyone, at least not directly. If you want to see an aggregation of all promotions, demotions and comments, go to the bottom of the page and click on "See all notes for this SearchWiki". This is the real wiki built by Google and it's easy to access by adding &swm=2 to the URL of a search results page: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=google&swm=2.



Comments are not very useful, although you could find insights for some obscure queries. The absolute number of people who promoted a search result is not very useful either, especially when you'll see big numbers like 314,159,265.

SearchWiki's main idea is to give users the opportunity to manually customize the search results and make them more predictable. Since many people repeat common searches like [mail], [weather], [news] and Google's results are constantly changing, it's nice to pick your favorite results and display them at the top. If you can't find a site you like, click on "Add a result" and manually add a page in the list of top results.

Cheers for the tip, it's potentially a very interesting thing but if they did start taking these comments into account it'd open the door for massive algorythm abuse by the big SEO agencies.

This whole thing took me by surprise, I saw the new buttons and wondered what sort of FF add on was displaying these buttons. Turns out, it's Google serving these buttons.

SURPRISE!!!!

Here's something that's interesting, when you did your test for some random search you said it was ranked number 2. Now it's ranked number 1! Why? Did they get any additional links??? optimize their page... OR did the 5 people who did the same thing as I did, and copy and pasted your query in and then promote it move it to the top???

I'm doing a test right now as well. I've already got about 5 friends to test this with me. I'm testing the term "virtual receptionist" which is a term I am not currently optimizing for. It is ranked like 117th on the 12th page as of the writing of this post. I'm going to be tracking it and seeing how many people I can get to promote it and what happens to the search rankings for this term, all else, relatively equal. If you want to track it the title of the result is "Virtual Receptionist Services | Sound Telecom".

Anyways I think this is very interesting. I'm going to try to get at least 20 promotions to this term and see what happens to the rankings.