Google SearchWiki – love it or hate it. Is it any good for business?
Late last year you may have noticed something different about your search results when signed into your Google account. Little arrows, crosses and thumbs suddenly appeared. This is Google’s “SearchWiki” and it appears when you are logged into your Google Account.
Note: If you just plain hate Searchwiki and don’t want to read any futher then you can turn it off – otherwise read on.
What does SearchWiki do?
We ran a trial in late November to explore any potential benefits in terms of marketing, SEO etc. Although the sample was small and trial length was short (6 weeks) we decided not to waste any more time and it was scrapped in January. Whilst it’s hardly scientific, the general consensus was that it was confusing and had no real benefit in terms of marketing or SEO.
What we learned was…
- Users would “nudge” their own websites to the top of search and their competitors out of the way.
- Users would comment on their own site with comments like “great site” or “great company”. The perception was that this would be seen by Google and help influence other results. (It won’t)
- Users would forget to log out of their Google accounts and mistakenly think they were #1 in the real results.
In the past 2 months we’ve had clients call us up asking why their site was number 1 on Google but a colleague in the same ofice would see a different result. We now tell all clients to log out of Google before checking their SERPS.
Whilst we’ve long been fans of Google’s innovative online products, we have our doubts about Searchwiki and whether it has any real benefit to the web user. We don’t see the benefits but we may discover otherwise in the months to come and we’re watching developments just in case.
Are there any the potential benefits?
There may well be, but presently the only beneficiaries appear to be Google. Conspiracy theorists could argue that Google is gathering our data for research and will use this for generating advertsing revenue for PPC, however, it is more likely that they will use the data obtained from “position nudging” and user comments to create a better user experience and reduce spam.
This would seem to be a good thing however, the reviews we have seen thus far are not what we would consider to be of any real quality. Most comments are of the form “great site”, “great service” etc. so clearly the quality of the review would need to have depth in order to be used effectively.
What about IP authority?
Purely hypothetical of course, but who’s to say they won’t use IP data to add authroity to a review in SearchWiki? A quality keyword rich comment or thumbs up from an authority site’s unique IP may well add authority to the site being reviewed – say a government site for example. Google could use this data and feed this into the mainstream results and provide a better search experience for the user. However this could easily be exploited. Spammers and those trying to game Google’s search results could easily hire 100 students or local government workers to give the “thumbs up” on the site review and the spammers have their day.
Whilst we doubt the business benefits of SearchWiki at present, we’re not foolish enough to smack it down just yet. It may well be that benefits for businesses will emerge as it matures and we will keep a lookout for opportunities.
