Goodbye to SearchWiki!

Even more personalisation this week coming straight from the Google Blog. They're now introducing stars to flag results so that they always show up for you. The example given is so that your favourite American Football team always shows up if you type NFL, for example. Starring your results can be done right in the SERP page of through the toolbar.

The good news is that this (along with sidewiki for those who like to leave comments) is to replace Google's silly "searchwiki" idea. I hope no-one was workingon that niche software I was thinking about?! hehe. According to the official post,

"In our testing, we learned that people really liked the idea of marking a website for future reference, but they didn't like changing the order of Google's organic search results."

Wow. People reaaaaalllllyyyy trust Google, and their search results, and I suppose there's the idea that if you change your results and can never change it back again, you might be missing out on new websites, news, current trends, etc. etc. It's a sensible move from google.



And just so that you know, personalised results are ALWAYS on. You can, of course, see the results WITHOUT this personalisation. Look at the image above, and you'll see a screen shot of being able to view the search results for Barcelona Restaurants without your personal history, for example. To reach this screen, you first have to click the "view customizations" link, which is cleverly positioned top right, where many people won't notice it (space usually reserved for AdWords).



As of today, I'm still seeing the searchwiki links at the bottom of the results pages, so maybe it'll be rolled out slowly over certain data centres before eliminating completely.

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