Google "star" feature to replace Search Wiki.
Google has been doing a lot of changes and enhancement on its major tools since the beginning of 2010. The most obvious aim of Google’s changes is that it is trying to get things personal. In the same way it has been doing behavioural marketing over the years (Google ads aimed to Gmail users according to the content of the email they’re reading), the urge to get the user to get more and more intimate with the web applications are growing. This is what drove Google to launch its new personalisation tool, the “star feature”, last week.
The “star” feature.
This might look self evident when we see it in action, the “star” feature stars a specific result in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and are available as “first” search results next time you search for the same keywords. This looks like a feature that seems to have been here all the time but never seen in Google. It calls to our common culture in software use to “star” elements and Google is launching it just now for its SERPs.
Why so late?
As weird as this might seem, there was a “star” feature type of tool available for Google account owners. It was called Google Searchwiki and had an extensive (for what it did) palette of features such as commenting and results re-organisation. This, along with the nightmare it suddenly became for SEO Experts, was a huge leap in personalising searches but… it never really caught user’s attention. Mind you, it might have had millions of users but Google calculates in terms of billions and this was the problem.
Useful or not?
Now Google is going on a new way of personalising results by replacing Searchwiki with this new feature. As useful as this might seem, I have to admit that I tend to forget about its presence as much as I did not really see any incentive in rearranging Google’s results. So is it still useful to have this “star” feature or not? What’s your idea on this subject? Would you be using such a tool as a regular or power Google user?
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I will not use it. And I am not really happy with these development at Google search. Simple reason is that I do not want results based on my favorite sites or based on my taste. I rather want results which are authoritative and which provides me the best information about what I am looking.
I noticed that if you “Like” a specific site and you are login to your email, then next time you search something, google tends to put results of the site too there.
I don’t search google to know about my taste or what my friend have written. For that I can manually when I wish check my friends site or blogs and read.
But when I search for information, I prefer a neutral result not favoring anyone. (Not even me). These days, I am finding Bing better to use.
.-= Kurt Avish´s last blog ..Tips for writing the best cover letter for job applications =-.
I didn’t look at things from that perspective. True enough, if somebody is searching for an information it must be authoritative and not biased by any other information the search engine can get from you. This might be a good argument for the new Yahoo/Bing search engine.