Google SearchWiki

» see google.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

On 20 November 2008 a row of small controls appeared beside every result on Google's page. An arrow pushed a link to the top of your results and kept it there. An X removed it. Underneath sat a comment box, and whatever you typed into it was visible to everyone else who searched the same words and thought to look.

This was Google admitting something it did not usually admit out loud, which is that the ranking was a guess. Ten blue links arrived every day with the confidence of a verdict, and here was the company handing you a pencil and inviting you to correct it. The pitch made sense on paper. Nobody knows better than the person searching whether the third result was the one they actually wanted.

What killed it was that the two halves pointed in opposite directions. The reordering was private and stayed inside your account, so moving a result up helped exactly one person and taught the ranking nothing. The comments were public and permanent, which is a very different product with a very different failure mode, and it broke the way public comment boxes on the open internet always break.

The controls showed up for a lot of people who had never asked for them. If Gmail was open in another tab you were signed in, and being signed in was the only requirement, so the arrows sat there on the results page of anybody with a Google account and a working browser. I had one. I used search dozens of times a day on TTNet broadband, doing engineering work, and I never once corrected a result. Almost nobody did, which is the entire explanation for what happened next.

~ the record ~

~ the wiki that was not a wiki ~

The name promised collective editing and the product did not deliver it. On a real wiki your edit becomes everyone's page. On SearchWiki your edit became your own page and stayed there, invisible to the next person unless they went looking through a separate view of other people's annotations that most users never found.

Google had good reasons for that. A search ranking anyone can push around is a search ranking that gets pushed around by whoever wants it most, and in 2008 the SEO industry was already large enough to make that a certainty rather than a risk. So the useful version could not ship and the safe version had no reason to exist.

~ the comment box ~

The public notes were the part people actually noticed, and they aged in days rather than months. Search for a big brand or a political term and the comment area underneath filled with advertising and the general sediment of an unmoderated box attached to the most trafficked page on the internet. Google was running a comment system on every query in every language and had signed up for a moderation problem the size of the web.

~ what replaced it ~

On 3 March 2010 the arrows came off and a star went on. Clicking it saved a result into Google Bookmarks and surfaced it near the top the next time you searched something similar. No public writing, and no claim that the ranking had been wrong. The star lasted a couple of years and quietly went too.

The idea did not die, it just moved to where it could not be gamed. Personalized results, search history and everything Google later built from signed-in behavior did what SearchWiki did, without asking you to click anything. Google worked out that watching which link you pick tells it more than any arrow ever would, and that people will not do work for a ranking they assume is already correct.

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