I was on twitter yesterday and had heard some rumblings about this new google wikisearch. I didn’t really think too much about it; but had noticed some strange things showing up when I was logged into my gmail account and doing searches in google.
I didn’t pay too much attention to it until I was searching for a video and came across this video from Google about Google WikiSearch today:
Here’s a quick and dirty test that I just ran:
Google WikiSearch Disabled
Google WikiSearch Enabled
Confirm enabling Google WikiSearch for the first time
It definitely looks pretty cool that you can add notes and get rid of sites that you don’t like too much. My thoughts are, if I’m going to be repeating a search, why do I need to rearrange things and put notes. That means that I already know what I’m looking for. And isn’t that why we have bookmarks and sites such as delicious, digg, furl etc. to hold and organize our bookmarks and share them with others…?
The other ramifications might be that Google will start using human edited rankings to influence their SERP’s (search engine results page). I’m not sure how much weight Google would give to the wikisearch if any at this time. But I’m sure people out there who are doing SEO will be testing some things out with this.
I’m not sure if I like the added “new feature” or not yet as I haven’t tested it extensively; however it seems that there isn’t a way to turn off the feature as noted by this article from the Washington Post and PC World Google SearchWiki Addition Fails to Wow.
You can get more info about it directly from google at SearchWiki.
If you have used Google WikiSearch or have some thoughts please leave your comments.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Bente // Nov 27, 2008 at 3:17 am
Hi Ted Chan,
nice blogpost. I stumbled upon it as I was searching for more info about Google wikisearch. I was wondering, did you unable the wikisearch when you did your test? You see, I tested the wikisearch a few days ago, and it might be that I unabled it without noticing, because now it’s gone. And I want the wikisearch back, but don’t know how to do that. Any suggestions?
2 Mukul Chaudhuri // Dec 4, 2008 at 1:40 am
This is the first day I’m using “Google WikiSearch Web 2.0″. I like your write up above. Thanks for sharing your views
Here are some early thoughts…
“however it seems that there isn’t a way to turn off the feature”
I don’t think so.. even if you are logged in the search result seems (to me) to be the normal one. When you are willing to see the notes you go to “See all notes for this SearchWiki”. So you know what you are doing. And if you are in the “See all notes for this SearchWiki” yes there is no direct way to get back except the browser back button… but indirectly you can go through “Google home” listed at the very bottom of the page. But this time you have to search it again. I think google should implement the ‘all notes view’ with the paging system(1 2 3 Next page etc.) together with top and bottom search fields of normal search.
The question of how much usable this feature is to me… I don’t think much.. for I am quite satisfied with present search. I usually get my desired results within first 10 in the list. For off bit topics where I need to go through the several pages of google search listing might be benefited from the user inputs. Let us see what google does in this regard.
To me I might find the feature “See all my SearchWiki notes” useful in days to come for what I think now that this might be my ‘Bookmarks Online’ once I get used-to with this.
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