Google SearchWiki

Well it seems the blogosphere is filled with news regarding the release of SearchWiki yesterday, a new social user experience approach from Google. 

I can’t say I am all that surprised with the move, it certainly is bold for Google to make such a dramatic change to the look of its search results, but with the growing traction of OpenSocial and Google’s understanding of socially driven content with the likes of Blogger it makes sense. 

Hell, it makes sense anyway. Google exists simply because they provide the most appropriate search results to queries made by their users, and whilst their fancy algorithms and thousands of engineers have gone a long way toward providing accurate results, there are still things that remain very difficult to cater for through programming.

Whilst the current release allows you to only influence your own search results, with comments being available to all logged-in users, Google has not ruled out the idea of using such influence in future versions of their algorithms. User influenced rankings adds another dimension to the search results hopefully providing increased accuracy, the same thing that has gotten Google to it’s current 75-90% market share depending on country. 

I welcome the change, it’s something that has been tried by other startups recently, but they all lack the clout Google has in the market, not to mention its index of over 120 billion pages. Any search start up that can’t provide such a comprehensive index of searchable results is obviously going to find it hard to compete, but I shouldn’t diverge. 

Congratulations to Google continuing to deliver technology to the masses, whether it’s through innovation or simply implementing someone else’s idea with your corporate clout it’s good to see that my search results will continue to improve.