Raulken co.UK - Roll your own search results with Google's new SearchWiki

By Jacqui Cheng | Published: November 20, 2008 - 06:45PM CT In an attempt to offer a more customized search experience—and to stay ahead of competitors—Google will soon be rolling out its SearchWiki feature to everyone using its services while logged...

If Google delivers useless search results, just erase them and you won't see them again. That's possible under a new system Google unveiled on Thursday. Hoping to give its search engine a more personal touch, Google now lets users reshuffle results so their favourite websites get top billing and disliked destinations get discarded the next time they enter the same request. It marks the first time that the internet's most popular search engine has allowed its audience to alter the order of search results. Although the revisions won't affect Google's closely guarded formulas for ranking websites, the company isn't ruling out eventually tapping into collective wisdom of the crowds to tweak its internet-searching algorithms. For now, Google simply wants to make specific sets of results more useful to each individual that comes to its search engine, said Marissa Mayer, who oversees the company's search products. Users will have to have a personal login to take advantage of the editing feature. "It should make the search results more dynamic," she said. The decision to let people tinker with their results is a tacit acknowledgment that not even Google's seemingly omniscient search engine can possibly divine which websites will appeal to specific users. It also underscores how frequently people use Google to search for the same thing, such as "San Francisco hotels," over and over again. Google's search...
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