Google Features Video Game Search Engine
I got a little surprise last night: A Google search for “dreamcast” featured a number of links to more specific video game topics, the type you’d see in a Google Co-Op search engine. Apparently, Google is letting the GameSpy, GameStats, GamePro, GamerHelp, AskMen, Games.net, IGN, CheatCodesGuides, and TeamXbox websites create a collaborative Co-Op search engine, and showing refinements for it on many video game searches.
These refinements show up on searches for “xbox”, “playstation”, “wii”, “super nintendo, “dreamcast”, “sega genesis”, “nintendo entertainment system”, “gameboy”, “nintendo ds”, “psp”, “gamecube”, “halo”, “gears of war”, “grand theft auto”, “metal gear”, “mario bros”, “final fantasy”, “god of war”, and tons of other video game related searches.
What Google has done is give a bunch of video game websites access to mess with its search results, presumably for free. Luckily, the engine thus far seems to be fair and balanced, not promoting any of its own “partners” over other, legitimate websites. For example, the top 10 for “halo more:screenshots” has:
- Bungie - the manufacturer of the game
- IGN - a partner in the search engine
- Gamespot - a competitor of the partners, owned by Cnet
- TeamXbox - a partner, also owned by IGN
- Gamespy - a partner, also owned by IGN
- GamePro - a partner, owned by IDG
- FiringSquad - a competitor of the partners
- 3DGamers - a subsidiary of IGN
- Games.net - a partner, also owned by IDG
- SoftPedia - a download site, independant of the others
So, out of the the top ten, five are partners/creators of the search engine, one is a subsidiary, and the others are the competition. Not terrible, not great, but completely justifiable based on the popularity of those websites. The placement of these search refinements is more valuable than advertising, since it appears part of the Google Search UI, and appears to have no means to opt-out, so if the creators of the engine used it for promotion of their own properties, that would be a major coup.
So far, the results seem mostly legitimate and beneficial, but I’d watch out for abuse in the system. Letting popular websites edit your search engine and receive top placement in the search results is enormously risky, and Google should consider whether this is safe, or even fair. Either way, they’ve given a good arguement for the upcoming wiki search engine. If Wikiasari lets the people edit the search engine, while Google lets companies edit it, there isn’t even a question of whom the average person would trust.
December 27th, 2006 at 3:13 pm
This is Google Co-op (like the health vertical, except for video games) and it’s been going on for a couple months or more:
http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2006-11-02-n80.html
December 27th, 2006 at 3:42 pm
Perhaps the input from those contributing sites are not weighted so heavily as to force out competing sites that Google surfaces based on it’s own algo.
Also, perhaps each site submits it’s ranking of the same pages, and Google’s tallies it all like competing votes.
December 27th, 2006 at 8:18 pm
Anyone can annotate pages and if you do a good job, you annotations can go live.
“You can help improve search around this topic by contributing your expertise. As a contributor, you label websites with the Google Marker while browsing the web, or by uploading a file with a list of labeled web sites. The sites you label will be given priority in your own search results. If you are deemed a quality contributor, your annotations will begin appearing in the search results of all Google users.”