According to the company, its SearchWiki is a way for users to customize search results by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on them.
The option presents a significant opportunity for search marketers to extend their brand — an issue of vital importance to traffic-starved adult website operators — as well as a new challenge in policing negative comments by competitors and adversaries actively campaigning against them. The move has also been heralded by some observers as the death of the venerable PageRank algorithm, although this has yet to be seen.
The announcement came in a post on Google's official blog by Product Manager Cedric Dupont and Corin Anderson, a Google software engineer.
"With just a single click you can move the results you like to the top or add a new site," Dupont said. "You can also write notes attached to a particular site and remove results that you don't feel belong."
While the search results listing modifications are designed to only be shown to users when they are logged in and perform the same search later, these preferences are stored in the user's Google Account, where users can see "how the community has collectively edited the search results" by clicking on the "See all notes for this SearchWiki" link.
According to Dupont, the Google team had been testing SearchWiki components for some time; conducting live experiments and incorporating lessons learned into the release.
"This new feature is an example of how search is becoming increasingly dynamic, giving people tools that make search even more useful to them in their daily lives," Dupont said. "We are constantly striving to improve our users' search experience, and this is yet another step along the way."