Google Vote This Story
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | November 29, 2007 | Share This
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Google Experimental has been spotted testing Digg style voting on search results, reports Googlefied. As explained by Google,
“This experiment lets you influence your search experience by adding, moving, and removing search results. When you search for the same keywords again, you’ll continue to see those changes. If you later want to revert your changes, you can undo any modifications you’ve made.”
Users can move search listings up or down, remove listings, suggest a better site or mark favorites. Though the experiment will only be running for a few weeks, it seems like an imminent addition to Google’s Personalized Search Results. As with Google’s other recent “2.0″ developments (Gmail 2.0 release, Shared Stuff, Google Open Social, Google’s purchase of Jaiku, etc), this experiment indicates the increasingly social direction of search. Smaller search engines, such as Naver in South Korea, have already exemplified the power of crowd-sourcing to improve search results, and so it doesn’t really come as a surprise that Google is experimenting with Digg-style voting.
Unlike Digg, however, Google’s social voting functions aren’t an opportunity for SEOs to game the algorithm. If anything, they present a challenge to SEOs to pay greater attention to a site’s usability and utility. Sites that provide users with an incentive to save and refer back to them will benefit from user-controlled rankings, whereas sites that are optimized without regard to user experience may lose visibility. I also wonder how SEOs might incorporate learnings from social media into their site optimization - will we see title tags written like Digg news items? “Google Vote This” chicklets on landing pages?
At the very least, user-voted SERPs will increase the “black box” of Google’s algorithm, making it harder to predict search rankings and more likely that competition for (controllable) paid listings will increase.
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