A couple blog posts have alerted me to an experiment that Google is conducting called Edit Search Results. A randomly selected set of Google search users are seeing additional icons on their search result pages. One of the items moves a search result to the top of the page via animation. There is also another icon which deletes an item from the search result page. Finally a third icon allows the user to enter comments about the search result item. You can also suggest another link to be included in the search result.
This functionality sounds like the Digg voting system where you vote a link up or down in the top Digg rankings. Google says the experiment is supposed to last for a couple weeks. The real question in my mind is whether user editing will have any impact on other peoples search results. Currently the Edit Search Results experiment is supposed to only affect your future search results when you are signed in with your Google login.
Marissa Mayer, who is Google’s vice president of search, has stated in an interview that the Google algorithms determine the ranking in the search result pages. She clarified that this ranking will not get recomputed due to any input such as the Edit Search Results feature. However this feature is still in experimental mode. Perhaps things may change if Google decides to roll this feature out for everyone.
The big question will be whether these results could then be gamed by unscrupulous individuals running tricky programs. I will wait until I actually see the Edit Search Results icons. Then I think this will be a task for Black of Hat.
