Reasoning Behind Google’s SearchWiki?

Does anyone else think Google’s new SearchWiki thingy is a little bit ill-conceived? In case you haven’t seen it, it lets you personalize the Google search results far more than you used to be able to; you can bump results to the top, remove them, or add notes. This is, of course, just for your results.

However, you can also see what everyone else has done, which seems to be a huge mess in the making. The blog post announcing it came at 4:36 PM yesterday, presumably PST. That means it’s been in production for just under 12 hours. In that time, there’s already a ton of public comments on some sites.

My first search was for [seo], assuming that those people would have been the first to jump on the SearchWiki bandwagon and bump up their sites while getting rid of their competitor’s — in the hope that Google may eventually try to rely on the votes of the masses to influence the public search engine placement results. Sure enough, every SEO site on the first page already had votes to push up or eliminate. And, sure enough, one annoyed SEO guy commenting on Google’s SEO page:

While the information can be useful for some people, I don’t see Google as a reference in SEO so why this result for such a specific term? Seems like an “inside push” to me.

Right. Conspiracy theories!

A few more searches and you find that Something Awful already has 20 comments on it, featuring such gems as “golden manbabies,” “ARSE,” and GAY BEARS repeated 40 times. And something that looks like an obvious troll…

Horrible site. The $80/month forum fees are outrageous, especially considering that they openly steal most of the humor from 4chan.

Youtube has 19 comments, again with many gems:

“What is it ?”

“harhar”

“The official YouTube website! (Is this the first comment?) InteractiveBUD!”

You also get a few people dumping their URLs in the comments, hoping for some stray copy and paste traffic. I guess at least Google isn’t making them active links.

But 20 comments in 12 hours? At that pace you’ll have over 200 comments in a week. After SearchWiki is up for a year, you’ll have 10,000 comments. There’s no way this can be remotely useful. Sure, the comments may taper off after the newness wears off. Or, it may ramp up, as more and more people realize that you can now leave public comments on Google for any website you want.

And since the average level of intelligence of the people commenting seems to be hovering just slightly above YouTube level, it looks like Google might be working on compiling the largest collection of incomprehensible, spammy comments in the history of mankind. Yay!

Does anyone think this is actually a decent idea?