Google SearchWiki: Toy or Trash?

Anyone who has ever disagreed with Google Search results can now, for their own use, manipulate the order in which links are presented with SearchWiki. Yes, you heard that right: you can move search results around and position your favorite ones at the top of the list.

It goes without saying that Google doesn’t, and can’t, let your own personal opinion of what the rankings should look like have an effect on search results for everyone. So you can only manipulate the order of the list in your own Google account.

Some undeniable benefits of using SearchWiki:

• You can move search results around in the order that is most relevant to you, and with the order being stored in your account any future searches will show your preferred order of links.

• You can attach notes to particular pages, making it easy to browse a search query later when you forgot why you liked a particular page.

• You can delete results from your search. Google thought something was relevant that turned out to be useless for you? Just delete it from your results and make it easier to navigate the pages that are useful.

• Share your thoughts with other searchers: you can see how the community has edited the search results by clicking on the link titled: “See all notes for this SearchWiki.”

Google released SearchWiki only three days ago, after having tested it for a while. To educate Google users, they also made this neat little video explaining SearchWiki:

Reasons to hate SearchWiki

Some people really don’t like the SearchWiki idea. Personally, the first thing that came to my mind was whether this idea made any sense. After all: pages that are interesting are usually bookmarked (e.g. with Delicious), or ‘stumbled’.

So why would Google try and put a new spin on what essentially translates into social bookmarking? Some believe it is to gather new data, and that the way people use SearchWiki will be used in Google’s indexing strategies.

Perhaps it really is just what it looks like: a way to enter the social book marking playing field, without outright copying what Delicious and Stumble are already doing, but rather trying to amalgamate the two strategies and putting a Google spin on it.

A full guide on how to use SearchWiki can be found at Search Engine Land

What do you think about SearchWiki? Are you happy with yet another way to organize your search, or are you upset Google has yet another opportunity to mine for user data on an enormous scale?