Search News: Google Lets Users Customize Search – Can You Digg It?
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Written By Noah Mallin | July 17, 2008 | Share This
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Just like Google, we here at SearchViews understand the value of seeing someone else’s good idea and running with it. Techcrunch had such an interesting post today on how Google is aping Digg that I felt compelled to blog on the same subject.
In a nutshell, Digg has been very successful at serving up content with a social media model – users post third-party news articles and blog postings and then the Digg community gets a chance to all be Emperor Nero and vote the content up or down. More Diggs leads to more story views in a natural democratic fashion. Users can also comment, share and even “bury” a story.
Since Google prides itself on giving searchers what they want, the idea of adding Digg-like interaction to search results is a short step for them to take. In a beta test being rolled out to selected users Google is allowing searchers to vote results up or down, and to add comments as well.
Rankings mean nothing if they aren’t relevant. A site could be all juiced up on incoming links and rank first but the second or third ranked site could have a more relevant description on the search results page and successfully get the click through. That site could also be expected to get a positive reaction from searchers using Google’s new system.
The downside to making search results more social? Mark and the esteemed Dr. Naveel both concurred that it would be hard to scale these ratings past an individual user’s page without attracting lots of unwanted spam. If Google had a hard time keeping a swastika from ranking number one in Google Trends a few weeks ago just imagine the chaos possible from allowing social interactions to run wild in general search results. Even a mass opt-in model is a recipe for malicious hijinks, or high dollar tricksters buying positive ratings or even reviews – something that’s already occurred on local review websites.
So far there is no indication that Google is doing anything other than testing out the idea. The underlying concept still applies to anyone who markets to search, whether it is through SEO or paid search ads. Relevance gets you the best ROI, just about every time.
For more cool subway art check out Poster Boy’s Flickr Page.
Topics: Google, Reprise Media, SEM: Paid Search, SEO, Search: How-To, Search: Innovations, Search: News, Social Media, Technology |
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