Search (is going to get) a whole lot more social
Next time you run a search in Google, you might notice some new features. This is big news for search and for social media. Let’s look at an example…
Here’s a search for ‘insurance’. Notice the new icons next to the search results.
These icons allow regular users to promote or demote search results - a social feature made popular by the news website Digg. If you see a useful result, you can give it a ‘vote’ which will favour that search result for future users, and if it’s irrelevant, low quality, or spam, you can help push it back down the search results. You can also now make comments on search results.
This is a big change for Google which has previously relied solely on a computer algorithm to rank search results, but now they have given some power back to users. This is a big validation of the Wikia social search concept being pioneered by Jimmy Wales, the creator of Wikipedia, although now that the Big G has waded in, there’s a good chance that Wikia Search will never make it to the mainstream.
Here’s a video from Google explaining what it’s all about.
What do you think? Is this going to make search results better, or will the tools be abused by spammers?
UPDATE 1 Dec 08: There’s been a lot of buzz in the blogs since SearchWiki was announced by Google, and we’ve had some useful comments on this post. It seems I was premature to describe this as a Digg-style social feature - apologies for getting ahead of myself in all of the excitement about the new features. At the moment it’s only the user comments that are shared between all users. The voting up and down of individual search results is said not to affect the results that other users see. My opinion is that this will only be temporary. Google will be collecting and analysing an enormous amount of data from this feature. I find it inconceivable that they won’t incorporate it into their algorithm at some stage. I can imagine this being rolled out in phases. Perhaps the first of which will be to only share the results of voting with people in your social network. So if someone I know votes up a result, I’ll see that, but if some spammer who I’m not connected to does the same, I won’t. Perhaps in the future it will show me which users have voted up a result. If I think someone has voted up a spammy result then I might be able to ignore their votes in the future. Building trust into the system to fight spam will be the key to making this work for Google.
What do others think? Will this turn into a fully-fledged social feature one day?
Tom wrote this on 21.11.08 –
It's filed in the Search, Social media box
On November 21st, 2008 at 3:16 pm, AndyB responded:
Give me a ‘not this’ button to tag on minus keywaords and i’ll be happy enough. I just need a few lowly paid chinese children to vote up my site and i’ll be a happy, moral man.
On November 25th, 2008 at 7:42 pm, Duncan responded:
Google says this will not affect how others see Google results, suggesting it will have no influence on standard search returns or ranks. However, I’m not sure. It would be a very cleaver way to remove spam and poor quality pages but Google would never tell us as it would be open to abuse.
On November 26th, 2008 at 11:30 am, Tom responded:
Hi Duncan, I’ve heard this too, and like you I’m skeptical. After all, they’re calling it SearchWiki, and what’s the point of a wiki where the changes are not shared? I don’t think they could make it a social tool in stealth mode - there are just too many SEOs and analysts out there experimenting with it for them to keep such a big secret.
On November 29th, 2008 at 3:42 am, Matthew Hill responded:
I think you’ve completely missed the point Tom. Regular users don’t see these widgets, you only see them if you’re logged into your Google account. And you can’t use them to influence search rankings a la Digg.
The point of the SearchWiki is for you to create your own personal search experience. You use it to clean up your own search results, move things around how you want them, or make notes on results. You can’t promote or demote anything in the general index.
The only thing other users can see is any notes that you add to your search wiki results, and they need to be logged into their account too.
Of course, it’s anyone’s guess what Google does with your wiki data and if they use it in any way to influence the main ranking, but it would be highly objectionable if they did and would pretty much eradicate the SEO industry overnight and completely negate all the work Google have been doing on building an intelligent organic search algorithm for the last ten years.
I’m very surprised you posted this blog entry as-is without doing a bit more research and giving it a bit more thought!
On November 29th, 2008 at 8:04 pm, Duncan responded:
I think I agree Matthew. It would be far too risky and game over if it ever leaked. In any case as you said it would undermine their previous work. More than likely it’s just another function to improve usability.
On November 30th, 2008 at 9:09 pm, Will responded:
To say that Google wont influence their current natural search with this human led data within the SearchWiki is to be short sighted. They have spent alot of money on this and it would be foolish to think that they have done it as an early christmas gift. For one, think of the revenue opportunity for Google if it were to open up individual users SearchWiki results pages to advertisers and charge them a premium for the privilege.
In terms of the Google algorithm debate could it not be that Google are looking to enhance traditional computer generated results with human intervention? This can only add to the quality and relevence of results and benefit all users.
OF course SearchWiki will only really suceed if we understand why people search - is it to find relevent but ultimately disposable information such as holiday information? or is it to search and return to the same pages over and over again? Most users fall into the former category. If this is true it will take a real mind shift in ordinary users before SearchWiki becomes a resource that people will use.
One of the most compelling areas to keep an eye on will be reputation management through the comments tools within SearchWiki. There seems to be nothing you can do if people decide to use this functionality to point out how bad your brand is. Online negative brand comments are as old as the web but these feel just a little more in your face and public. Have a look at some of the predictable comments attracted by large brands such as GM / Google / Exxon in the public SearchWiki results.
On December 1st, 2008 at 10:39 am, Tom responded:
Hi Matt, it’s interesting that you think I missed the point. I find it hard to imagine SearchWiki not becoming a social feature over the long term and think it could make the search results even better, rather than negating the value as you say. But you’re right that I got ahead of myself so I’ve updated the post. Interested to hear your thoughts.
On December 1st, 2008 at 6:19 pm, Matt Hill responded:
Sorry, I didn’t make that clear about ‘missing the point’. I was referring to the demote/promote widgets specifically, not the overall idea of a ’social search.’ When the feature was announced, I read many similar blog entries saying that Google was allowing Digg like functionality for general usage and I was pretty surprised to see how many people were reporting this fundamental error.
Remember, the commenting and promotion feature is only available to people who have a Google account. We might expect everyone working in the industry to have one, but we mustn’t forget that Google account holders are still only a small % of the number of people using Google search.
It would be rather unfair to take the whims of this relatively small minority of web users as dictating the relevance of any given search result. I’d be extremely alarmed at Google if they did use this subset of data to influence their natural results. It’s just not on.
Also, how would you allow for differences in context? Say I search for “blue”, wanting to know more about the colour, but I receive a top result for the mind numbing boy-band. I’d demote that result as being irrelevant to my search — if this data is then used to influence the result when someone is searching for pop twats, then that’s problematic.
I just can’t see how this would be fair system.
On December 1st, 2008 at 6:43 pm, Tom responded:
That’s the beauty of the blogosphere isn’t it? A mass of misinformation, gradually unpicked and filtered by the crowd :)
Perhaps users will have a choice in the future: To have an algorithmic-only search, or to login and have ’socially enhanced’ search results - they can choose for themselves whichever yields the best results for them.
Social search could help Google to understand context. For example, if I have friends in my social network who like the band Blue (who doesn’t?) then maybe results about the band will be favoured. I also like the idea that where context is unclear, Google guesses based on what people ’similar’ to me usually want. So a physicist searching for ‘Strings’ will get a different result to a guitarist or a programmer.
You’re right that at the moment, Google account holders are probably a small % of the overall user base, but the use of social networks is growing like mad and will probably become ubiquitous. Coupled with the gradual trend towards opening up the walled gardens, there could be a potentially enormous number of networked Google users.
On December 2nd, 2008 at 8:34 pm, Duncan responded:
I think Will picked up on a good point about advertising motivations for Google. Currently adwords can show adverts influenced by what it thinks we like or are interested in, dependent on our search query. This wiki will give Google even more info on what we like and maybe just as important, what we don’t like (offensively talentless boy bands), and if a user is logged in, Google has the potential to offer advertisers the most targeted audience to date. For example, Google would show me adverts of where I can buy Natalie Portman posters but not from her Star Wars shoots as I would have demoted all sites pertaining to the last 3 “films”