question for my readers: google results remove+promote

Googleresults

Can anyone explain what the remove/promote buttons are supposed to do on the google results pages? Have they been around for a while?

10 Comments leave a comment below

  1. I think they’re meant partly for you to optimise your search results, i.e. you can remove results that are irrelevant, and change the order if you think Google has ordered them wrongly, and partly to improve Google’s own rankings.

    I could be wrong though, certainly I hadn’t noticed them before today.

  2. It’s new, announced today – you can leave yourself notes too…

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7740815.stm

  3. your google looks kinda different to my google and why does my google not have this remo+promo thing?

  4. muy gravy, you have to be logged in for those icons to show up.

    http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/searchwiki-make-search-your-own.html

  5. I don’t see those either. What browser are you using? And are you on the Google.com site or a localized one?

  6. neat post on Seth Godin’s Blog about this,

    http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/11/google-gets-jig.html

    “Google gets jiggy

    If you’re a signed in user of Google, you’ll notice the most significant change in search since their launch.

    You can now interact with search results, wiki style.

    You can vote them up or down and leave comments. And they will be seen by others.

    1. This is going to lead to an incredible rush by small businesses and social networkers. They’re going to go crazy trying to game the system.

    2. Google is going to find that millions of people pay a lot more attention to their search results (for now).

    Interesting to consider what happens after that. How do they handle the deluge? Does democracy matter when it comes to search? How do you filter out the gamed votes?

    Also interesting to think about how a tiny change in a beloved interface changes the way you think about and use it.

    Google is a natural resource. We’re defensive. We don’t want them to wreck it, we want it to be here forever and we want it to work better for us. All at the same time. I give them ten points for bravery.”

  7. this is new! i was doing searches this morning and something sure didnt look right – i guess this explains it.

  8. It’s part of their new search wiki, and you have to be signed into iGoogle to see it. The current theory right now is that Google’s algorithym won’t take a huge amount of notice of the results voted up or down, just as they don’t take a lot of notice of social bookmarking, although social bookmarking IS given a certain amount of weight and the search wiki results probbaly will get some weight too. My guess is they will probably monitor it more for large trends.

    But to make a long story short: they’re trying to find out how useful their search results are to you by soliciting direct feedback, instead of looking at less direct markers such as click through rates and time spent away from Google after a click through before returning to do another search.

  9. it’s referred to as “Google Search Wiki”

    “…a way for you to customize search by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results.”

    BUT.. the customizations are only visible to you. Changes i make to my personal search results wont effect your search results to the same query. Though theres an option to view comments made by other googlers if you so choose.

  10. I immediately typed in a search for “skylark” and added my personal site (skylark64.com) in. It didn’t show up when I searched from another computer.

    The thing is… Google is innovating like wildfire or hot cakes or some other phrase that denotes “at an incredible pace.”

    I heart Google.