Clicking and Screaming

Google caused a bit of a stir in the blogosphere towards the end of last week with the launch of SearchWiki, a new feature for Google account holders.

SearchWiki enables you to customise your search results when signed into your Google account – if you don’t have one, you’re missing out on great tools like Google Reader, Google Calendar and a few others. There’s a decent guide here, but this is what you can do with SearchWiki:

1. Comment on your search results. When you leave a comment on a result, it’s the only customisation which is visible to other users. This is the bit which could be defined as ’social’.
2. Move a search result to the top. It would be more helpful to have the ability to move it up one by one, but the SearchWiki way simply means you’ll have to move any results you want to focus on up in reverse importance order. Confusing, but you’ll get used to it.
3. Delete a search result. Even Google provides a great deal of useless and irrelevant results, and now you can get rid of them.

You can also add a result to your search, allowing you to add in any missing links known to you and keep them in place – all the changes you make to a SearchWiki results page remain for the next time you run the same search. Movements, deletions and additions are only visible to you, and only when you’re logged in.

I quite like SearchWiki, though I see it as useful rather than life-changing. I find it entirely unobtrusive (a criticism levelled at it by TechCrunch, which has sourced a guide for removing it – as has Google) and I think there may be occasions when it’s handy to be able to annotate and doctor a results page. Teething problems aside, I think it’s a neat little tool, but truthfully I don’t know how much use I’ll get from it in reality.

The other side of the coin is that you’ll be able to see comments from other users on your search results. But is this a help or a hindrance? I can see how this feature might be obtrusive, and I can’t think of many searches I’d be running where I’d be more bothered about reading recommendations (or otherwise) than clicking around a little and just finding out for myself. My comments would matter to me. I think taking comments from others is just a little bit too social in the search space.

That said, it’s important to listen and you never know when a comment might flag something surprising up. That’s the beauty of social media.