Biggest Update to Google, ever!
Written on 20th November 2008
8 COMMENTS 
Mircea Goia, Next Web US Webtipr
Today, (well, it is yesterday at the time you read this) Google will roll out a new feature to its well-known search engine: custom search results. That is, you can now edit the search results. More power to the masses. The feature’s name is Google SearchWiki and it has been in an experimental phase the last several months (only some users had access to it).
“This is a search feature that gets a user more control over their search results,” said Cedric Dupont, Google’s SearchWiki product manager. That means you have to be signed into your Google account in order to have the possibility to use SearchWiki (the changes you have made will be saved in your account so next time you come to Google you will see your previous work).
You can see the SearchWiki feature to the right of each search result title: an up arrow lets you move a result higher on the page and an X will remove the result. After moving the result higher a down arrow shows up (of course) so you can move it back down the page. After editing the result the icons will turn green and that’s a reminder for you that you edited that result. There’s another icon, a bubble, which lets you leave comments for others to see.
Of course, if you can move and delete results you can also add your input. There’s an “Add a result” link at the bottom of the search results page which lets you do just that. Now, if you removed a result how would you bring it back? No worries, there’s an Undo kinda feature at the bottom of the page.
People can share their SearchWiki notes with others by clicking a “See all notes for this SearchWiki” link at the bottom of each search results page.
Will this feature help Google become even better at sorting out the search results? I wouldn’t be surprised if they would use the data collected to improve their search engine and other services Google has.
By tomorrow (today, at the time you read this) all the users should be able to use this feature and you can tell us your experience with it.
At the time of writing this article I didn’t yet have access to this feature…
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