Google Explores Participatory Search Results

Google’s success was built on their early recognition of the value of tacit social data (like linking, and more) to help gauge both relevance and quality in search results. Now it seems they’re moving toward an approach that combines their traditional algorithmic approach to search with an explicit voting system, where users vote individual results up or down for a given query. Here’s a demo:

Naturally, because it's Google, everyone's talking about this. For an overview, check out the  comment thread at TechCrunch:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/16/is-this-the-future-of-search/

In general, there’s great precedent for combined tacit / explicit quality measures. Users express preference and valuation in a number of different ways on different sites, and those expressions control which content shows up where. This works well. Digg and Reddit, for example, use yes / no voting systems like the one Google’s prototyping combined with algorithms; de.icio.us uses the act of bookmarking as an explicit expression of valuation in combination with tacit factors like timing; YouTube uses ratings combined with views and other factors; and Flickr uses a “secret” combination of views, comments, favorites, and other factors to identify the good stuff.

Applying this kind of explicit quality measure to search results is new, as far as I know. But does it make sense? I can imagine a couple problems:

First and foremost, how do you know whether an individual result is relevant and high-quality before clicking through the results page and accessing the resource? And if it’s exactly what you wanted, why would you go back to the results page and vote it up? There’s an assumption baked into the idea behind this that users have a strong enough investment in providing feedback on their searches that they’ll interrupt their task at hand to participate. I say, unlikely.

So if the best results aren’t getting voted up, an explicit voting system won’t reward them.

What will happen is that the results that look best on the search results page itself will get rewarded, and the results that look bad will get punished. So an important effect of this kind of system is that it will place a premium on optimizing the metadata that gets displayed on the search results page. Don’t forget those page headers!

One thing that I do think might motivate users to participate in this voting system is revenge. If you feel lied to or misled by the information displayed on a search results page, you might be a tad more likely to go back and register your displeasure. So, one of the effects could also be an improvement in the accuracy of search results page descriptions. Power to the people!

What do you think? Is Google on the right track here, providing an explicit feedback system, or are they just being lame Digg copycats?