Chris J. Politzki’s Blog

Some of you may have noticed some new buttons / features to your Google search results pages last week. It seems the development team over at Google have decided to allow their users the ability to customize their search pages. This feature is only available when you are logged into Google. Google is calling this their ‘SeachWiki’ feature.

This newly released feature also has the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) world waiting on pins and needles to see where things are headed with the way Google will use this data to craft it’s algorithm to de-emphasize ranking within search result pages when searching with Google. Some are saying that ‘Ranking is Dead’! Follow this previous link to view an interesting interview and article with Bruce Clay and his take on the future of ranking within Google and the importance of traffic. SEOs will now have to rely heavily upon looking at analytics, bounce rate, and traffic.

But I wanted to show everyone the new feature so that everyone can start using this to better cater their search results to themselves. It really does help find that site that used to be on the second or third results page and throwing it to the first page at the top! You can even delete certain listings that you don’t want to see. Obviously, creating a more customized search.

So at first, we’ll do a search for ‘Yellow Pages’ (as I work for one of the local internet yellow page web sites… ).

At first glance, you’ll notice the ‘Up Arrow’ & ‘X’ to the right of the listing. Under that there’s also a ‘Comment Balloon’ icon.

 

Allow me to go briefly over each item here:

Above, you will see how the ‘Promote’ button appears once you mouse-over it.

 

Once you click on this ‘Promote’ button it will not only move the listing to the top of the page, but it will also add another field below the listing where data is revealed as to how many people promoted or removed the listing and their Google Account names.

 

The ‘Remove’ button functions pretty much in the same way, except that when you click on it the listing disappears from your search results.

 

Not only can you promote or remove a listing, but you can also add a comment to remind yourself what you enjoyed about this site, etc. Or you can also allow other Google members to view your comments, which I will describe below.

 

What’s really interesting is what appears at the very bottom of the page:

 

 

There’s a line appearing with ‘Add a result’, ‘See all my SearchWiki notes’, ‘See all notes for this SearchWiki’ & ‘Learn more’ links.

When clicking on the ‘Add a result’ this appears:

This allows you to customize your search results page even more by adding a site or page that you feel should be included within these results.

 

Clicking on ‘See all my SearchWiki notes’ reveals:

Clicking on ‘See all notes for this SearchWiki’ also shows your comment, if you left one, or all the comments left by Google users for the ‘Yellow Pages’ search.

 

And finally, clicking on ‘Learn more’ goes to Google’s description of this new feature.

 

At YouTube, there is a SearchWiki video which better illustrates the new features in action.

 

As I mentioned the SEO world is anxiously awaiting to see how this new feature will affect rankings within the search results. Until then, we can enjoy customizing our search result pages.

 

Chris J. Politzki
Studio 119 Degrees

 

SEO Related Future of Search, Google SearchWiki, SEO