How Businesses Should Adjust to Google SearchWiki

- December 2nd, 2008 by Steven Leung

In this article:

The folks up the street in Mountain View recently launched the ability to customize and comment on search results using its Google SearchWiki. Because the comments made on SearchWiki are public, business and website owners need to adjust to these new features in order to maintain and cultivate their online reputations.

SearchWiki Overview: What’s Important for Businesses

Anyone who logs into Google with their Google account and does a search will see additional icons next to their search results. Clicking the up arrow lets you move an entry higher your own personalized search rankings, and clicking the cross icon hides that entry. The number of people clicking the icons is tallied by Google as we’ll see momentarily.

SearchWiki Results

For businesses, the most important feature is the comment system, which lets any Google user make a public comment about that entry by clicking the quote icon. Commenting is simple. Users can type in anything they want and it will appear as a comment under that entry in Google SearchWiki. (HTML isn’t rendered: what you typed is escaped.)

Public Comment

If you make a comment, it will then appear underneath the search result. While this caption is only visible to you, your comment is visible to all other Google users, just like an online review.

Arbitrary Comment

You can see the comments you and others have made by using the link to view “All notes for this SearchWiki” at the bottom of the search results page. When you click on that link, you will see the Google search results page with links to all of the most recent notes recorded for that search term.

Screenshot for All SearchWiki Notes

The number beside the up arrow is the number of users who have clicked the up arrow to raise a listing in their personalized searches. Think of it as the total number of positive votes an entry has received. Similarly, the cross icon represents the number of negative votes.

How SearchWiki Reflects and Impacts Your Online Reputation

The example above uses a search for “Google”, so naturally Google’s home page is the appropriate first search result. Yet almost 11% (275 people) clicked the cross icon to remove it from their search pages.

Why?

Simply because some people don’t like the company. Have a look at Microsoft’s entry where 25% (63 people) have used the cross button.

Microsoft's SearchWiki Results

The comments above illustrate something important for businesses: anyone can spray graffiti on Google about your company, about any topic. Most companies will get a lower volume of comments than Google and Microsoft, which means that the top comments — good or bad — will stay visible longer.

Currently, SearchWiki shows 10 comments at a time. The comments are chosen based on how recent and popular they are. People can vote for a comment using the thumbs-up icon to the right or against a comment using the thumbs-down icon.

Why SearchWiki Only Deserves Minimal Investment For Now

For now, SearchWiki is a low priority investment for companies looking to create a stronger online reputation. A strong showing in SearchWiki will not currently impact how highly your site ranks in Google or how often it appears in search results for the foreseeable future.

In fact, people will generally only see SearchWiki graffiti once your site has appeared in their search results. Even if you have stellar quotes in SearchWiki, the increase in traffic to your site will be marginal. Investment in content creation, online branding and advertising, and search engine optimization all take priority over SearchWiki.

It is important, however, to prevent false or damaging rumors from being spread about your company, which means that policing SearchWiki for such disinformation is important — especially because the graffiti sticks to your search results.

SearchWiki’s Hurdles

SearchWiki can actually become an integral differentiator for Google’s search capabilities. There’s no reason why Google can’t eventually integrate the feedback from SearchWiki with Google Webmaster Tools. SearchWiki is already able to aggregate comments across multiple search terms and the combination of human feedback from SearchWiki and algorithmic feedback from Webmaster Tools would give website owners keen insight into how well-received certain pages are when they show up for various search results — possibly to the level of how well they convert prospects.

The other hurdle SearchWiki needs to overcome for businesses is the complete lack of accountability that users have when making comments. Google has effectively created a review site and there’s no mechanism to communicate with authors to recify issues or correct misleading statements. There is only a direct response using a public comment on SearchWiki. (This is ironic because, for consumers, SearchWiki has also had to dodge privacy concerns because of its 100% public comments and lack of opt-in or opt-out.)

If Google establishes a clear direction for SearchWiki and ensures that users are actually accountable for what they say in public about a third-party, then this service deserves formidable consideration.

The Risk of Forgetting About SearchWiki

But SearchWiki can’t be ignored because of the potential for the information from SearchWiki to be tied into Google’s search results algorithms. An interview with Google’s SearchWiki product manager by Search Engine Land yielded the quote, “We’re always looking at user data as a signal,” when asked if SearchWiki information could be used to rank search results in the future. This potential and Google’s market share make SearchWiki a factor when considering online marketing priorities.

Tags: Search Engines, Websites

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