What Is Google Doing With Votes?

Google, which is all about unique algorithms, page ranks and huge data centres, has started experimenting with using humans, that is you and me to vote for search results. At least that is what it seems as.

This experiment lets you influence your search experience by adding, moving, and removing search results. When you search for the same keywords again, you’ll continue to see those changes. If you later want to revert your changes, you can undo any modifications you’ve made. Note that this is an experimental feature and may be available for only a few weeks.

As many have said, it is not clear if this is going to influence the global results or just for me, in which case it is more of a personalized service. But there is quite some speculation about this, especially since human powered search engines are getting noticed. There was ChaCha with search guides, then Wikiasari where you could vote for good and bad pages and more recently Mahalo where the entire search result is written by a dedicated candidate. And now Google too wants you.

I see Google’s experiment closer to the Swicki where a community can improve the search results. Is Google doing it because it does not believe in its search results or is because they are getting too predictable? But the more I think about it, the more I agree with Marshall Kirkpatrick, to hold back the Digg horse.

Will Google risk quality of its search results, which is a product of years of research, loads of time and money, be affected by laymen? I doubt that it will let the user override its search results, they can perhaps complement the machine calculated search results. What do you think?