Google Dabbles In Digg-Style Democracy - InformationWeek

Manipulating Google hunt consequences used to be something of a achromatic art, and those who crossed the line from hunt engine optimisation to gambling with nexus farms got the Google Death Punishment -- .

While delusory attempts to travel Web pages to the top of Google hunt consequences pages still run the hazard of excommunication, Google looks to acknowledge that the order of its hunt consequences needn't be sacred. The company that made its luck by turning democratic option, in the word form of Web links, into ballots for relevancy is giving its users a more than expressed manner to vote on its hunt results.

Google Lab's page, which allows users choose in to one of respective in progress hunt sweetening tests, have given a limited figure of visitants the option of adding, moving, and removing hunt consequences from the hunt consequences pages returned by their queries.

"This experimentation allows you act upon your hunt experience by adding, moving, and removing hunt results," Google on its Web site. "When you seek for the same keywords again, you'll go on to see those changes. If you later desire to revert your changes, you can undo any alterations you've made. Note that this is an experimental characteristic and may be available for lone a few weeks."

The difference between this experimentation and SEO use is that the alterations made through the diagnostic test service are evident lone to the individual who made the changes, not to everyone using Google.

Those participating in this limited trial see two new icons alongside their hunt results: an up-arrow and an "X." The up-arrow advances a given hunt consequence to the top of the hunt consequences page in a mode reminiscent of Digg-style voting. The "X" fells a given hunt consequence so that it no longer looks for the chosen keyword(s).

There's also a nexus at the underside of the hunt consequences page where new Web page URLs can be entered so that they'll look when the chosen keyword(s) are used in the future. Search consequences added this way, or through an up-arrow vote, acquire marked with an orange star to separate them from exclusively algorithmic hunt results.

As to whether Google weighs ballots to impact its index as a whole, the company supplies no information. However, it would be a phenomenal waste material of corporate intelligence to disregard the consequences if, for example, a big figure of people consigned the same hunt consequence into limbo for obvious wrongness or irrelevance.