The Beginning of Personal Search: Google SearchWiki

There’s been a lot said of late about the future of search, and two common themes have appeared time and time again. We’ve already talked about semantic search (and its effect on PPC), and now seems an apt time to talk about personalisation.

In a nutshell, that’s the ability of search engines to customise results to an individual user’s requirements – often based on localisation, search history etc. Google has a tendency to think differently about solving problems though, and with the announcement of Google SearchWiki last Friday (UK time), they’ve turned that on its head.

Yes, YOU can now customise Google search results to YOUR liking.

Found a website that you love and gives you all the right answers for a particular query? Now you can just move it to the top of the results! Don’t like a website, or think it’s not appropriate? Simply remove it from the results!

SearchWiki also offers a commenting system to allow you to make notes on particular websites within the search results. There’s more useful tools found at the bottom of the page too – if a website isn’t listed but you know of its existence, just type in the URL and it’ll be added! You can also view everyone else’s comments for that particular search.

Still trying to take all this in? Watch the Official Google video below for more:

How will this affect the Search Industry?

Opinions are varied on this; with one industry leader suggesting that personal search as a whole means “ranking is dead” and that questions like “Did I get the conversion I was after” will become more prominent. Other boo-boys are suggesting that the system is wide-open to spam and people employing hundreds of others to influence the search results.

Here at hômejames however, we always look on the bright side of life. We’ve been mixing traditional SEO with a conversion-minded approach since our inception.

Our belief? This is a very smart move from Google. No doubt that they’ll be collating data on the individual searches, as already suggested by the ability to view the comments of others, and our prediction is at some point in 2009 we’ll see this starting to influence the normal Google algorithms too.

By harnessing the common thought of billions, Google’s just taken a huge step forwards in combating one of their biggest problems too – web spam. The collective effort of all these users will undoubtedly make it a lot easier for them to spot spammy sites in the search results – it almost adds that human-edited touch, without them paying anyone a salary for doing it!

Traditional SEO will still exist – people still have to find web pages before they can start personalising results to their tastes – but if anything, this forces home the fact that your website should be built to impress your target market – both in design, content and functionality, if it’s to continue succeeding past this point.