California, November 21: Google has launched SearchWiki, a new tool that lets you customize your search results to suit your preferences. To give your search results some interactive touch you may even leave a comment against any listing, which would be visible to other users as well.
As soon as you log in to your Google account and begin your search, you would see two small icons next to each listing: An upward arrow and an X. The upward arrow would let you relocate any listing upwards, and you can delete any unwanted listing with ‘X’.
For more advanced searches, you can also add other web pages to the search result simply by using ‘Add a Result’ feature found at the bottom of the search result page. This way you can make your search exclusive to yourself.
And this is not just one-time facility; SearchWiki would remember changes you make so that whenever you search again for the exact word or phrase, SearchWiki would retrieve your customized version of the search page.
The website owners might get worried that customizing of search results may affect their web ranking. For this, Google has ensured that SearchWiki would not change the traditional page rankings of the web pages. The adapted version of the search page would only be visible to the user who made the changes; other users will still see the general search page.
However, if the users click the “See all notes for this SearchWiki” link at the bottom of the page, that link would lead to another page that shows what results other users have re-ordered, removed, or added. This is the reason Google product manager, Cedric Dupont, does not completely rule out the possibility that user data from SearchWiki may someday affect regular search rankings.
SearchWiki is also expected to expand service’s functionality further, as it would enable Google to collect huge amount of user data. Prior to this, Microsoft has also released a similar kind of service, Urank, that allows users to organize, edit and annotate search results, as well as share information with others.
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