SearchWiki: A Do-it-Yourself Search Engine from Google

What search engine optimization professionals can learn from Google's new SearchWiki, and how to use it to their advantage.

On Nov. 20th, 2008, Google introduced its new SearchWiki feature. Once you are signed into your Google account you can use SearchWiki to enhance your future searches. SearchWiki allows you to rank, delete and comment on sites that are in your search results. The next time you perform the same search, your changes will be noted. This is supposed to provide you with a more relevant search next time you search using the same keywords.

The modifications that you make to your results only affect your future search results, not anyone else's search results, claims Google. These search result modifications will eventually affect everyone, as Google gains valuable data and insight into the relevancy of particular keywords within a site, and to the end users idea of what is actually relevant to them. I can see little practical benefit to the end user, and most people will bookmark relevant sites that they wish to re-visit, instead of repeating the search query over and over.

If you do any type of search engine optimization work on your own website, you know that what consumers search for and what they actually are looking for may vary greatly. Anyone performing a Google SearchWiki search can tell how the others have edited their search results by clicking on the "See all notes for this SearchWiki" link. This could become a useful tool to webmasters & SEO tweakers everywhere.

Once SearchWiki has been around long enough to establish firm trends in how the community sees the relevancy of sites to a particular keyword, I am going to search for the relevant keywords for my site, and see how others have viewed the results. Is my site relevant to their particular search term? Are my competitors? There have been no edits yet for my keywords, but SearchWiki is new. The arrows and comment boxes are in the background for now. Word is just now getting out that the Google SearchWiki is live.

This personalized way of searching will hopefully increase conversions, bringing visitors to websites that are of interest to them, and reduce bounce rates for websites that are not relevant to the search term used. I personally prefer visitors to my website that have an interest in purchasing the products that I offer whether that happens to be today or at some point in the future, rather than misguided surfers. It has always been hard to choose particular keywords as its amazing what some people will use as a search term. Sometimes their choice of word(s) has no bearing at all on what they are really hoping to find.

Unfortunately, Google's new SearchWiki has opened the doors to unscrupulous SEO companies who may start programs where people are paid a few cents to do Google searches while logged into their Google account and bump up certain sites relevancy. Will Google take into account if certain sites are being bumped up far more times than normal? Will Google established a threshold in their algorithm of what they would consider an abnormal number of searches from the same account for the same keywords. So far Google has kept their ethics in a different pocket from where they keep their money. It's a balance I'd like to always have them maintain. Your opinion, like mileage, may vary.

I am going to take a positive attitude on this new Google innovation, and make it work for myself, my website and my customers. (Web clients and purchasers). After all, Google has the market cornered on searches, and while it may be called "search engine optimization," it really is "Google Optimization." Google SearchWiki, it's the old yellow pages, now with added detergent power!