A few months ago I wrote a post on what the future of the web will look like. As a part of a massive treatment on the subject, I looked at how future search engines will operate. Here’s what I said,

“..search engines will need to have a better understanding of ‘context’. One way to accomplish this is to take a nod from directories and allow results to be tagged. These tags can be voted on by the community and would only be an addition to, not a replacement for, traditional sorting algorithms. Thus, if an eCommerce site is tagged as being a source for information on ‘iPods’, the community has validated this with their votes and the algorithm acknowledges that this is true, it would appear high on the listing for searches within the context ‘iPod’.”

The web moves fast, very fast and it seems that Google is already rolling out what may be the first step along this path.

Search Voting

The way the experiment works is that for a select few users they have been given the ability to influence how pages are sorted for them. If you like a result you just click on the up arrow and its sent to the top of the SERP. If you think a result is completely useless, click on the X and its gone forever.

Finally, if you think that a page should be in the listings that isn’t all you have to do is suggest it and it will appear the next time that you search the term.

Google remembers your preferences and your order will be maintained between sessions.

This feels a lot like how Swicki’s roll your own search engine works, but just on a much larger scale. At the moment it is not particularly interesting, but the implications could be huge. For a system like this it seems likely it will be rolled out as a “personalized search” but in all likelihood Google will store this data away. Imagine hat would happen if they had millions upon millions of user suggestions about how the SERP should be ordered. This could be a game changer for Mountain View.

Of course anytime you let users suggest things there is a chance that it will be gamed, but as long as these suggestions are only an addition to and not a replacement for the normal sorting algorithm this may not be as big of problem as it could be. More importantly, the sheer volume of people using Google (and potentially using this service) makes it even harder for any individual or even a medium scale botnet to launch an effective attack.

Web 2.0 Roundup

Will we be seeing a feature like this hitting our Google pages anytime soon? Probably not. It will probably be a few months before Google works out the bugs enough to make it worth their time. That being the case, this is a good sign that search might be moving towards its next logical evolution. How successful will it be? Only time will tell.

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