Google Making Search Social?

By Greg McNevin

November 30, 2007: Google is taking some direction from the social networking scene and is testing out a new addition to its search engine where users can vote on search results, pushing positive results up the search ranking and burying unhelpful links.

Online now at Google Experimental Labs, the service enables users to improve search results by adding, moving, and removing links altogether.

These preferences are stored, and when the same search is made results are filtered so the good results gain more weight, and the not so good do not appear on the main page.

As it is an experimental feature, the filtering currently only changes a particular user’s results, and not that of the wider community.

Voting systems like this do run the risk of being “gamed” by a hacker with a bot army, so provided Google does go ahead with the service it will be interesting to see how it tackles security and accuracy issues such as these.

Current a Google account is required to try out the service.

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