I’ve been beating the drum about why personaized search and google’s search wiki are bad since their rollout. Even though I understand why google does it, and get that why they push it’s adoption. But I still think it’s a bad idea, and late last week I saw an example of why it’s bad and dangerous, and why it’s something all marketers need to understand.In early January Google pushed out a fairly significant change that seems to have favored big brands, and Aaron Wall spoke about it. While some people tried to derail the conversation into another pointless blackhat, whitehat, hacking debate, the search community luckily found it’s way out of the rabbit hole and discussions got back on track. Danny Sullivan tweeted he was looking at the SERP for [cars] which activated an old test I had done when search wiki first launched, making Matt Cutts #1 for the keyword cars. (screen shot below)
I’ll highlight the important parts (click to enlarge)
When search wiki first launched I wanted to find a website that I knew was going to get lots of up-votes, so Matt was a perfect test subject. I wanted to tag him for something he wasn’t relevant for so anything automotive was a good choice. I wanted a nice big fat “head term” to see how much influence search wiki would have, a few months later we have the answer.
Now before you fly off the handle, the only person who is seeing Matt #1 for cars is me, so it’s a bit like playing with the color on your TV and then blaming the network cause everyone looks a little green. However we need to understand the larger implications of this and a few key points:
- The programming exists to inject search wiki into the algorithm, right now it may only exist on a per user level, but I bet the programming stubs exist to take it to everyone.
- Google is ignoring the PWS=0 parameter for search wiki, there is no way to turn it off.
- While greasemonkey, and stylish scripts emerged to not display search wiki, and SE reps suggested using them if we wanted to “turn it off”, that’s really not an effective solution, at best we are hiding from reality.
- As was discovered at SMX West Google is willing to change your SERPS sometimes in SIGNIFICANT WAYS and not tell you about it.
As a marketer it really has become an imperative that you understand and start to interact with search wiki. If you think this is never going to have some input into the algo and rankings, you’re not looking at the handwriting on the wall. It’s coming whether you like it or not.
Lastly Google can you just give us an off switch that WORKS already … really is it that freakin hard?
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{ 14 comments }
Just goes to show you what Beta relase is like. Heck until just recent GMAIL was still in Beta
Yes.. and I might add, they also turned off the little checkbox where you can suppress the ads when you set up the custom search engines. It was always the honor system up until now, so I was expecting to be hit with it at some point anyway. Now, it will cost you $100 a year to supress the ads for a basic site search mechanism.
Someone with an alternative as powerful as google’s spider would do real good right now.
This was my, and many others’, immediate reaction to this search wiki when it first came out. How some people don’t see or think that Google will use this as a factor in future search results is beyond me. You are 100% correct in that “the handwriting is on the wall”.
What I don’t understand is why Google would diminish the complexity and usefulness of their search algorithms with something that is possibly so easy to manipulate. I am sure there are tons of companies / people already outsourcing commenting and voting of search results for people, which compromises the integrity of Google’s SERPs.
The biggest selling point of SEO has been that the search results cannot be bought or manipulated by anyone. If this changes then an industry with an already checkered past and bad name to many novices is only going to fall. This would be a shame because then Google would then have two enormous revenue models in the Sponsored Results and the organic results, which would give them even more leverage over everything that has to do with search marketing.
I am really hoping that this scrapped soon….
Did you up Matt in searchwiki for general automotive terms? or for the exact term “car”?
just the one term as far as I can see
If they do implement something like this, its as open to abuse as link buying or anything else is when stretched beyond the individual user so personally I wouldn’t worry about it.
It will just result in a new way of doing things. IMO.
I think this is a case of Google getting bored and trying to mess up something that already works fine. If it’s not broke don’t fix it. A few other engines are starting to copy many things Google does such as Ask.com and they are starting to take some of the every day user traffic. If Google changes too much then people will just find somewhere else.
Is it truly Google’s long term goal to create a unique search experience by machine? I would think this to be a bad thing for them. The machine is not the searcher. We are the searchers. The query being conducted at that time should be independent and not reliant on past queries. This can only cause a huge mess for relevancy. Essentially creating a “snowball” effect building on past search query data that could have nothing to do with the actual query currently being conducted.
search for things related only to cats and watch the adwords ads, then things only for dogs. The first one or two searches for dogs will show some cats advertising, it’s somewhat bizarre to watch
Now you’re going to get a bajillion spam emails at atlasws.com, even with gmail’s robust spamboxing.
why not gaussian blur your username?
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The workthrough is to have another pc with IE and FF and never saving any tracking cookies or any toolbars…
This a dam annoying feature. It is a mistake on Google’s part, a crack in their facade as the monopoly of searching.
It’s interesting seeing Google trying to push the envelope and bring in new ideas to keep them ahead of the pack. Over the coming months / years we will see whether this is a Google master stroke or something that dissapears…
I have been testing the search wiki and I must say it tend to favour the know brands. The problem with individual search is you never know what the user next door is seeing, but for me it’s definitely favouring the large and popular sites.
This could in the end make it harder to promote new brands and sites, and reducing the democratic nature of the web. But I guess Google often call it black hat when a brand new site push down one of the old established sites.
Graywolf…
You echo some of my early thoughts on the searchwiki’s potential influence.
I think that G will begin using this ‘user generated’, ‘human influenced’ data to start tweaking results sooner rather than later.
Their main concern is improving user experience. The fact is… humans are the best indicators of what others would expect. If G is able to block nefarious activity and server better results to 80% of users…
Will be interested to see what happens…
@nuzunet
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