google search manipulation

I guess Google is adopting the philosophy that "The Customer is Always Right"

They are letting the user score the site.

I can see this being the same thing as reviewing a product on Amazon or other sites where you can vote. Google just isn't asking for a written review. You are "scoring" the site with a thumbs up system.

I'm sure someone out there will come up with some scheme to try to manipulate that.

That's the way I thought it worked at first, but someone else on the forum, I can't remember who it was, said that it didn't change the rankings for everyone, just your personal rankings when you visit that keyword. So if I visit the same keyword my results would be different than what you show.

Clint

I think what you will start seeing is a drastic jump in gmail signups.

Funny thing is, someone figured out how to 'crack' the google captcha, so what they do now is simply make you enter a captcha 3-4 times in a row. (If you are a 'legit' user and try to sign up with a gmail account, chances are you will have to enter the "captcha" code 3-4 times (and re-enter the password you want to use) before you can get an account).

I think yes, it will just be a new form of search manipulation. Temporarily it will "work", but then the same way you saw link farms, you will start to see 'click' farms (or 'click my link' and i'll 'click' yours kinda deals)

Actually, it *does* change personal rankings, but from what I know/can see it is also used to garner statistics/data for larger searches...

If they do carry this over to the general searches, it will certainly be easily manipulated. How natural is it when a site ranked 100th gets clicked on by 100's of users a day. I can't imagine this lasting.

Matt

Oh yeah I remember reading about this actually - it's a personal search feature which only shows when you are logged on. They already do that with the ppc ads. They show you ads based on your location.

I did read somewhere that they were going to do that with the organic listings - show you stuff based on your search habits and location.

A couple weeks ago, my client and I were looking at his PPC positions. He lives in Illinois. What he saw was a placement of #3 and I saw his ad near the bottom of the page. Google was showing me a bunch of PPC ads based on my location (Arizona) first which pushed his ad to the bottom of the page.

Once I logged out of Google I saw different ads.

My thoughts on the matter. Taken from my personal blog on the day they released 'SearchWiki' as it's called.

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As I went to Google to perform a search something struck me as different. New icons had appeared next to each of my search results. At first, thinking that I'd accidentally turned on an unwanted Firefox Plugin, it took me a few moments to realise that this was actually a change to the way Google will provide your search results.


Whilst you are logged in to a Google account there is a new feature named SearchWiki, where you now have the option to remove a listing from your results or promote it to the top of your page. If you own or run a website you were probably asking the same question as I was "Will SearchWiki have an effect on SEO and my websites ranking?".


For the moment at least you can sit back and play around with this feature to your hearts content. Google has stated "The changes you make only affect your own searches." Anything you do at the moment will only effect the way that you are provided your results. Having said that with so much user generated input on websites that they may never have fully reviewed before it's hard to see that this won't eventually play at least some factor in search engine rankings.


The obvious things that will stand in the way of this ever being a completely trustworthy way to generate website feedback is the huge opportunity for Spammers. Less than honest webmasters could potentially manipulate search results hugely in their favour and even launch campaigns to crush their opponents.


Another thing to think about if you use AdWords is the potential knock-on effects for your website. If you are not generating great quality content for your users or providing relevant information on your websites you could get knocked from a lot of people's search results. There is nothing that I'm aware of to stop Google in future using this information to decide on the charges and position of your AdWords Campaigns. After all the ultimate goal of any search engine is to keep their results relevant and therefore profitable.


In conclusion as long as you are providing great value through your website this should not effect you too much and probably won't in the future. It's just something to be aware of and can always be used to filter your own search results as long as you have a Google Account.

Well, actually -- with respect to spammers -- by requirign people to have a 'gmail' account in the first place, it will make it more 'difficult'. (I.e., only the really 'good' spammers will be able to manipulate search results, because they will need to control 1000's of e-mail addresses, etc). If just *one* guy say uses a gmail account and tries to manipulate search rankings, google (rather the algorithms) will be able to easily recognize that and disregard that information.