Google has unveiled its SearchWiki product which adds a familiar social media flavour to Google’s clean search engine results page.
When signed and opted-in, the changes recall elements from Digg, StumbleUpon and most strongly Wikia search, the community-powered open-source search engine from Wikipedia. It allows for comments, influencing of the results (personal rather than community in Google’s case) and the good old rate up/down.
It’s no bad thing to use social media technology, but my gripe is with the clutter on the page. Google has made a fantastically successful search business on the back of its clean, uncluttered pages, that deliver you (usually) where you want to go with a minimum of fuss.
Google is always testing tweeks to their page results and this is a rollout of one such test, but the clutter to Google’s simple formula seems a test too far. Time will tell how univeral that opinion will be.
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