SEO

If you saw this one coming, give yourself a very large prize. Google is experimenting with Digg style voting features on search results that allow users to vote up or bury search results they see.

The program, part of Google Labs, works like this:

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.

At the moment the results of the program will only be stored per user and not applied to the general search index, so that sites buried (”I don’t like”) will not appear in future results for the user, where as sites voted up will stay up. Google Labs notes that “this is an experimental feature and may be available for only a few weeks,” still, who would have thought that Google would even experiment with Digg style social voting.

Screen shot below directly from the programs site: Google Experimental Search

This is really interesting and this may change everything on search engine world. I hope Google take prevention against bad usage on this. Webmasters may search opponents sites and try to bury their search result. This is really interesting.

I agree. It could be very helpful - but also definitely something subject to abuse and manipulation (unless it is 100% single user personalization - but I doubt that).

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Joe Ward / Crawlability Inc.
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By the way - what software do you use to create those zoom ins?

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Joe Ward / Crawlability Inc.
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Joe, that screenshot directly from google. see Google Experimental Search

The feature is good, but I am sure it will be widely misused and exploited by several not so good search users.

Take for example, microsoft guys hired 1000 guys to work round the clock pulling down linux, and similarly linux offering $10/1000 clicks to pull down microsoft pages from search engines.

It will only result in chaos which would be too difficult for Google to Handle. Moreover search engines will never ever disclose their hidden rules and ranking information of their algorithm.

There will always be exploits. However, I assume that they will use a highly advanced algorithm to detect unfair manipulation and minimize it's impact.

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Joe Ward / Crawlability Inc.
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