As of November 20, 2008 Google have introduced a new feature to their organic results. If you have a Google account and you are logged into it, when searching you will see some new icons against each of the search results. Google are calling it SearchWiki. It is Google’s way of letting the user customize their search results.

At this stage I don’t think it is working for all accounts. When I log in using one email account and search I don’t see the new features but logging in with another seems to work.

As you can see from the image, next to each search result are three new icons. A promote icon (which is the one with the up arrow); a remove icon (the one with the cross) and a comment icon.

Clicking the Promote icon moves the site in question to the top of the search results.

Clicking the Remove icon removes it from your search results. If for some reason you want to get the deleted one back, you can do so by scrolling down to the bottom of the search results screen and click the ADD A RESULT link. Of course, you will need to know the URL of the site you removed as from what I can tell, there doesn’t seem to be a way of seeing the sites that you have deleted. You can also add any other site using this option.

You can also add comments for each search result which is a handy little feature.

I think this is great for the user but how will this affect SEO? This remains to be seen, but providing good quality content is going to be even more important as who is going to promote your blog or website if it is just a spammy piece of work?

Google emphasizes that this won’t affect other people’s search results but you would have to think that this is a great way for them to see what is popular and what isn’t and at some stage they may incorporate it into their search algorithm.

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