Google's voting experiment 30 Nov 2007

The blogosphere started hyperventilating with excitement yesterday when Googlified - one of several independent Google watchdog blogs - discovered a new voting feature in the Experimental section of Google Labs. This prompted widespread conjecture that Google is about to start crowdsourcing search rankings in a manner akin to Digg.

While this could be the case, such predictions are a little premature at this point. Let's look at what we know for certain: The new feature lets users give a thumbs up to certain items to move them up their personal results page or click on an X icon to hide them from view. Users can also suggest a link to be included in their personal results page when they submit a particular search query...And that's pretty much all we know.

So, what this all boils down to is that there's absolutely no indication that these personal votes will influence everyone's search results (per the Digg model). In fact, it's actually quite unlikely that this type of thing would be of interest to Google at the present time. As Read/Write Web notes: "The [pre-existing automated indexing] algorithm reflects years of ongoing work by some of the smartest scientists in the field. Google doesn't need your and every hired fraudulent clicker's input into what's a good search result."