With the emergence of the Google SearchWiki I thought that I would put together a small page about it. One of the largest concerns in the marketing community after reviewing the new Google SearchWiki is that when people vote up a certain result, google sees that, and may now give greater weight to that result. Can you imagine if 1000's of people voted up a certain result, google has got to pay attention to that. Its my opinion that google will use this data to adjust search rankings, they would be silly not too. By introducing SearchWiki google has now farmed out a type of webpage screening, to the masses, for free. I Dont think google would ever use any of their man power to manually check websites to see if they actually deserve the rank they are getting, but by using the SearchWiki they've now got manually screeners (real humans) voting and commenting on search results. Sure they are saying that the effects only show up on the individuals computer, but why would google throw out this valuable information? The folks at google are very smart and this is just another example of that. Hate it or love it, I believe it is now going to have to be part of your marketing arsenal to keep these comments and votes in mind. One of the first pages to report the Google SearchWiki was at http://www.thesearchwiki.com . The site shows what it looks like, and how it works.
Here is a screenshot of the Google Searchwiki in action:
