Google launched the “SearchWiki” feature last week, which enables you to promote results for searches or eliminate sites from future search results. I see this as a big deal for anyone in marketing: although you can get access to other people’s comments, I think the main use for this tool will be as a way of assessing the effectiveness of Google’s algorithm. I am sure that the engineers at Google will be tweaking their search algorithms to match the results users are creating manually with the new buttons.
An additional development is the ability to comment on sites. You can also see others’ comments (although this is a couple of clicks away).
What does this mean to anyone involved in marketing? Well almost any innovation is seen by spammers as an opportunity, and the comments are no exception: TechCrunch has already highlighted the problem of spam comments on their search results. Also I’m sure that there are people madly clicking on particular companies’ results to promote them and try and boost their position on natural searches (although hopefully the engineers at Google are smart enough to filter this activity out). Finally by not slapping the ubiquitous “beta” badge on the feature, maybe Google is signalling that for online sites, Beta is no longer cool!