TechCrunch are reporting on a trial currently being run by Google that supposedly enhances its search experience. The video isn't much longer than a couple of minutes so it's worth taking the time to watch it. But what's it all about? Well, amongst other things it allows you to vote on the relevance of articles returned in Google's search results. So if you typed "Best TV Programme ever" in the search box and Google returned an article on Big Brother, then you could vote it down or up in the list (I know which one I would do). Ultimately, the community would influence Google's ranking of a page against a search term. Obviously it's more powerful than simply changing the ranking of Big Brother articles. For instance, if I was looking for "Printer Drivers" and Google returned a taxi driver on page 1 then the community could vote that off of page 1. The concept is very much like Digg in that the community decide on what's hot and what's not. But without controls this can be abused. For instance, someone could write a Bot that voted the BBC's sports news page off of page 1 when you search for "sport news" - at the time of writing that page is the top item given those keywords. So in that case it's not the community voting a page down but instead a malicious script writer. That's just one example of how it could be abused if controls aren't put in place and I'm sure there would be many more. Innocent companies spend a lot of time perfecting their pages for Google to rank appropriately - okay, there are many that are more obvious about their SEO tactics but this proposed change in Google's search engine could hurt businesses if the system is abused. Certain companies will no doubt try and vote their competitors off of the first results page for their chosen keywords. So although I like the concept, I'm nervous about how it might end up being used. At least it's not the real Big Brother determining what pages I see. What's your opinion? Would you use it? Would you trust it? Dan
