The blogosphere is buzzing about Google's announcement that they have made Google SearchWiki the default for users who are signed into Google while searching.
What this means is that users will see features to promote, delete and comment on search results. This is advanced searcher stuff. I am really a bit surprised Google pushed this to every Google account user as the default. Why? (1) As Arrington said, it wasn't broken originally - well, some would disagree with that. (2) It is confusing for the average searcher, no?
Do you think the average searcher is ready for it? Take the poll directly below this line:
Okay, so some basics that might not be clear to every reader of this site:
- This only changes your search results, no one elses
- You must be signed in to use it
- You can change the results back
For SEOs, will this impact the future of search? Well, yes and no. Clearly, people can now promote and remove sites, so you may benefit or not from that. But will Google use this data to improve their overall algorithms? I would suspect so, on some level. But with any Wiki-like system, it can be spammed, so I doubt Google will rely on this data too much.
That being said, let's get our SEO and promote me higher. There is this other Barry Schwartz who uses Barry Schwartz in his title tag. He wrote some books to play with people's heads. He is much older. He spoke at Google. He is much cooler. But I am in the SEO crowd, so I should rank #1. No?
Here is the current default results for barry schwartz in Google:
Now, go down to my personal blog, CartoonBarry.com and promote it.
It will then pop up this window, say "yes."
It then should put my blog at the top for you:
Click on the comment bubble on the right of the result and leave me a witty comment:
Thank you!
Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums, WebmasterWorld, Sphinn and DigitalPoint Forums.
