August 2, 2007

Sticky Google Search Results

Another day, another Google experiment. Mike Grehan noticed an interesting option at the bottom of a search results page: "Know a better page for [your query]? Suggest one!". After you add a page, it will appear at the top of search results for that query. Obviously, only for you.

"Yes, you get to input the URL of a favourite page on the query subject, click the button and, of course, you're taken to your Google account to log in to your personalized search."


This might be an interesting way of bookmarking web pages: associating a query with one or more pages. Google already personalizes the results by looking at your search history and your bookmarks. Maybe Google will also use this data to improve the quality of the search results.

{ via Search Engine Land }

5 comments:

  1. If I already knew the URL of a better page, why am I searching for it in the first place?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Easy. Let's say you know a great site with C# tutorials: csharptricks.com, but it's not in the top 10 results (maybe not even in the top 100 results) for [C#].

    You're searching for [C#] to find other great resources and Google offers you the option to place csharptricks.com at the top of the results. Now you can search for [C#] and easily access your favorite sites.

    A OneBox for Bookmarks would be almost equivalent.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I am worried about this kind of system. It provides spammers another way of manipulating the results.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Like he said, it doesn't affect search results. It will only affect yours.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Somehow I don't feel like this. Query results and quality should be updated over time and not take my word for granted, even if it's for my own search. Bias would be good, build on similar sites to mine for example, but not always on the top.

    This way, people will get busy building and modifying their search result behavior, which is something that is supposed to be taken care of by the search engine.

    ReplyDelete

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