One of the big stories in the search world this week has been Google’s test interface featuring several Digg-like social features. Google is not the first company to delve into human assisted search. Other notable players in this field have been Mahalo and Wikia. Having the undisputed kings of search dipping their toes into these waters certainly gives credit to the notion that search relevance may need a human touch. I’ve been playing around with this new interface the past couple of days and here is what I’ve learned:
Who has been chosen as testers: I have three Google logins, yet only one displays the new social features. My AdWords and Gmail logins are displaying your typical search results. The login I use for Reader, Notebook, iGoogle and Calendar for whatever reason was my golden ticket. I don’t know if this was random, but I would guess that heavy users of Google products are being selected.
How results are affected: Each search result has an up arrow and an X next to it. Voting a result up moves that result to your number one result for any future searches you make for the searched keyword. Clicking X will remove that result for any future searches; however there is an option to view results you removed.
Community edits: In the interface there is an option called “Everyone’s Edits”. Clicking this link brings you to a results page that only features sites submitted by users for a certain search term. Users suggest sites by clicking a link and submitting a URL in the main search results or on the “Everyone’s Edits” page. Currently these results are pretty limited. The most results I’ve seen for any term has been a whopping 5. The interesting thing about this feature is that number of votes seems to be the only factor in how sites are ranked. In every result I’ve seen with multiple sites, the results were ranked in order of aggregate score based on up/down votes.
Commenting: Users can leave comments about any site in the search results. Comments are viewed by clicking a plus-box. Again there are very few results I’ve seen with comments. I believe they are being sorted by most votes, which are made with thumbs up/down icons.
Search Your Edits: There is an option called “Review Edits” which lets you see only edits that you have made. You can view all of your edits together or by search term. If nothing else, I could see this feature becoming a good bookmarking tool.
Whether or not this new interface becomes useful will ultimately be decided by the quality of the community. I’ve already seen some blatant spamming by people submitting sites for general terms like “music” and “news” that they have nothing to do with. In Google’s perfect world these results will be buried by an active community. Regardless of the current quality of results and the potential for gaming/spamming, seeing Google letting the masses toy with their search results shows just how far “social” has come on the web.
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Me.dium recently released a search engine that has amazing human touch. It is a social search engine that produces the most relevant results based on past click streams and searches. It uses what people are searching right now to show other users what is “hot” or pertinent. To become an influencer of results all a person has to do is to download one of Me.dium’s social toolbars or sidebar.
Me.dium’s Social Search, which leverages the Yahoo! Search BOSS platform, provides an entirely new level of information on top of traditional search. Me.dium’s Social Search harnesses the activity of the crowds to let you find information that has relevance based on what people are actually surfing right now.
Me.dium’s technology lets the inherent activity of real people – not robotic crawlers – determine relevance. Me.dium’s Social Search results show what people are surfing and find interesting, right now. While other search engines base relevance on how content links across pages, Me.dium’s Social Search shows you the most popular news, reviews, pictures and videos that other people are actually looking at in relation to your search term. And as the activity of the people online changes, so do the search results.
Thanks for mentioning in your piece. I am part of the community team at Me.dium and if you have any further comments, critiques, or questions about any of our products please send me an email at cmaller@me.dium.com Thanks again!