Google finally launches SearchWiki - there was little rejoicing
A couple of days ago Google launched their much anticipated social media / wiki search initiative: SearchWiki. SearchWiki allows logged-in Google users to customize their search results by promoting, commenting, deleting or even adding specific SERP results. These new features are nothing ground breaking, social media services like Digg have been allowing interaction with SERP’s for years and Wikia Search has been doing the same thing for awhile now. However, when it comes to Google anything they do becomes a game changer based on the pure volume of people who use the service and the amount of companies that rely on the organic traffic it generates.
Here is a screen shot of SearchWiki at work with one of my affiliate websites. As you can see next to the title there is an up and down arrow. By “promoting” my site for the search term “college football jerseys” my site went from the 11th spot to #1 in my search results. At the bottom of the listing there is the comment option which allows you to make whatever comment about that specific search result you want - this comment is public, meaning anyone can see what I wrote about the search result.
Here is a screen shot of how to add a site to your SERP. The below option shows up in the footer and allows you to add a specific URL that will show up the next time you search for that specific keyword. If the URL you add is in the Google search index you will see it show up like a normal listing, however if the URL is not indexed you will see just the URL. This raises the question whether or not adding a URL that isn’t indexed would expedite the URL being crawled and added to the index quicker then with other methods.
Obviously everyone within the search business, especially those involved in SEO, are keeping a close eye on SearchWiki. Google is making it very clear that the changes users make to their SERP are seen only by them and does not affect the overall public ranking of a website. However, Google can do whatever they want and it is conceivable that they add how many people promote / remove a website to the overall ranking algorithm - they could even take into account the publicly available comments based on things like keywords. For SEO’s anything and everything has to be planned for.
The real and immediate impact SearchWiki will have is for reputation management, product reviews and customer feedback. SearchWiki will allow customers, fans, clients and anyone else who is logged-in to leave their opinion - good or bad - about a product, company, offering or person. Screw over some people? You better be prepared for anyone who searches for you seeing those negative comments. If anything this shows the increased importance of companies having a comprehensive online communication and customer interaction strategy in place.
Google seems to be working out some of the bugs with program as SearchWiki sometimes goes away for me. I expect to see fluctuations in the service for some time as this is a massive undertaking on the both the technical and strategic side.
For additional information check out the offical Google SearchWiki video:
