InsideGoogle

Google Experimental Adds Suggest, Search Digging

Google Experimental, where Google runs experimental search interfaces which you can subscribe to and add to your regular search experience, has added two new experiments.

Keyword Suggestions is Google Suggest, the Google service that offers search suggestions as you type, is now available as an Experiment. This is great, being able to add it as part of your personal search experience, since Yahoo and Ask.com already offer it in their main search engines.

A limited number of users are also being offered this experiment, which allows them to delete and re-order search results. It’s been described as almost a Digg-like system, in that the eventual goal would be to improve Google results through the wisdom of crowds by changing the results for everyone based on a mass consensus in the voting up and down (and deleting) of search results. This feature was originally developed on Google’s SearchMash test engine.

The voting experiment is a tasty one, so much that those who haven’t been offered it are clamoring for it, while the Google Suggest experiment has so much potential appeal, it should be an option in Google’s preferences. One limitation of the Experimental program is that you can only “install” one experiment to your search results at a time. Hopefully, Google will find a way to offer Suggest as an option to all users and let them choose a different experiment to play around with.

November 30th, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | General | one comment