Try using Google’s new feature, “SearchWiki”, where you can promote or remove a search result. You have to be logged into your google account to do the promotion/removal, and the action will only affect your search results. But your action will show up as part of the community comments when other people view the results you have promoted/removed.
**Alas, it did not work for my Google Korea search results, I had to switch to English Google to see the effect.
Read this google post for a bit more information.
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November 26, 2008 at 1:59 pm
swhcm
Do you think that this feature is a good tool for users, Alice ?
In my point of view, it is a good tool to share searching experience among users, but sometimes merely a bookmark tool to note your preferences. As an example, when I want to search for a specific group of keywords the second (or third,…) time, I may want the search engine to show up “new” suggestions. I expect the search engine to evaluate and show the best links at present time, not the links I thought the best, but now obsolete. Using Google SearchWiki, I might miss interesting update search results and tie only to the links that are good according to my old knowledge.
Besides, the quality of users’ comments is uncontrollable. When we search for a good restaurant in Yuseong district, for example, we may see comments next to a link like “I have been here, this is the best restaurant in Taejon”, but the truth is not. This time, Google search pages become free places for advertisements.
It would be much better if Google can find better links based on the customized ranks we did for links. For example, I search three or four times for a restaurant in some places in Taejon, and rank 1st and 2nd for those located near KAIST only, although other people in Taejon do not do the same. Then, Google should guess that I have only limited transportation means and customize search results for other related queries a little in the future regarding to this problem ^^.
November 26, 2008 at 10:41 pm
aliceoh
Well, all of your points are indeed valid and important. But I think google has a good start. I think they are doing it as a place to start gathering information about personal preferences. I hope that they will use it to develop a more advanced personalized search system. I doubt that they can extract distance-based customizations yet, but that may be coming soon also.
February 6, 2009 at 11:23 am
Liudmila
Thank for the tip