In an attempt to increase user engagement as well as ad revenue potential, yesterday Google launched "SearchWiki", a way to customize the appearance of search results with comments, annotations, result removal and even changes in the order the results for a specific query are being presented.

Cedric Dupont, Product Manager, and Corin Anderson, Software Engineer at Google, described the feature as follows:

"With just a single click you can move the results you like to the top or add a new site. You can also write notes attached to a particular site and remove results that you don't feel belong. These modifications will be shown to you every time you do the same search in the future. SearchWiki is available to signed-in Google users. We store your changes in your Google Account".

Despite the name of the project, it may be worth noting that, of course, the changes made by a single user won't get reflected into the global search results, and will only be visible for the same person who made the edits, whenever logged into his/her Google account. However, users will be able to access the results as edited by the community: to do so, they will need to click on the "See all notes for this SearchWiki" link.

Google might have took this idea directly from Wikimedia's "Wikia Search", the community-driven search engine from the non-profit organization that is also behind the Wikipedia website. The experiment, which can be found at this address, is an attempt at making users an essential part of the algorithm that selects the most relevant results to any given query.

In Wikia Search, eve

ryone can in fact rate, modify and write comments and other annotations for the search results, with the material then shown mainly based on the ranking provided by users themselves, in an approach that resembles to social bookmarking in some aspects, but that is unfortunately also quite prone to spammers interfering with a pleasant user experience.

Since Wikia Search's approach — which has encountered some organizational problems as well in the last few weeks — was certainly not a viable one for Google, the approach of the Mountain View, California-based search engine was instead that of making notes private, as the blog post announcing the feature repeats several times both in its text and in the embedded video explaining the feature usage in more detail.

As Google engineers explained, while users won't be able to see other people's edits, they will be able to display some basic statistics (number of comments and "promotions" of any given result to the top spot) for how other users logged into their respective Google Accounts rated a search result.

It is also possible to simply add a search result to the top page, simply by scrolling to the bottom of the results page and clicking on the "Add a result" link. Finally, users will also be able to access a list of all their search results edits, notes and corrections and undo one or more of such edits by clicking on the "Restore" button near to the search result of choice.

It will be interesting to see whether, with time, a big number of positive annotations from a sufficiently large number of Google Account owners will be enough to convince Google engineers to make minor adjustments to their search algorithm to keep track of this new factor.