It's old news, but formally announced on November 20, 2008, Google rolled out their "Search Wiki" allowing people to personalize their search results and "move the sites that appear in rankings up or down, take them out altogether, leave notes next to specific sites and suggest new sites that are not already in the results (or are buried too far down in the results to see). Users must be logged in to Google to use SearchWiki and can revisit their annotations when they perform the same search later."
Hmm. I'd rather use bookmarks to remember sites that I want to return to, but you can't turn the search wiki off. It's there whether you want to use it or not.
Then Google's Marissa Mayer mentioned in a December 10 interview that the Search Wiki will soon have an "off" switch. Great. But "Mayer also talked about Google’s use of user data created by actions on Wiki search to improve search results on Google in general. For now that data is not being used to change overall search results, she said. But in the future it’s likely Google will use the data to at least make obvious changes. An example is if “thousands of people” were to knock a search result off a search page, they’d be likely to make a change."
This sparked much discussion about ways that the feature would likely be gamed by those with the inclination.
If Google is actually going to make ranking decisions based (even partially) on how web sites get treated by SearchWiki users, we're going to have more search results decided by editorial board decision. We know that some percentage of sites get manually reviewed today and search results do get hand-modified by Google, but it seems SearchWiki "votes" will clearly be causing even more of that.
