YouSearch!

For years, Google has resisted incorporating human input into its search method, relying instead on its ultra-secret algorithms to rank the results. Now, the company has taken its first step toward letting users customize search results themselves. With SearchWiki, a new service announced by Google yesterday, users can set up a Google account and rearrange the search results to reflect your own personal priorities. The idea behind this is simple: some forty percent of the time, users ask the same search query they've already asked before, returning to the same themes over and over: noodle shops in San Francisco, perhaps, or hiking trails in the Sierra Nevada. Now you can rearrange the results to highlight your favorite noodle shops and hiking trails, having them pop up in front the next time you look for them.

So far, users can only do this for their own search results, so any spammers or search engine optimization geeks trying to boost results for a company will be disappointed. But SearchWiki may have built a back door into tweaking the results for the query as a whole. SearchWiki allows users to post comments on the search results page, and other users will be able to read your remarks under a section titled, "See all notes for this SearchWiki." Over at the New York Times, Brad Stone says that Google might incorporate these comments into search rankings in the distant future, a prospect that must have ranking-obsessed businesses fairly salivating.

SearchWiki's comments section also seems like a shot across the bow at Yelp.com, the online customer review service. Which lends itself to a whole new series of concerns about review-rigging. The Santa Rosa Press-Democrat, for example, recently reported allegations that Yelp salespeople have offered to move negative reviews to the bottom of its lists for businesses that advertise with the company. Google's new SearchWiki walks a fine line between using humans to refine search and letting humans abuse the results. We'll see how they manage it.

Here's a short tutorial of how the new service works, courtesy as always of YouTube: