New Design Experiment Allows Users To VoteWriting by Nick Stamoulis on Thursday, 29 of November , 2007 at 2:43 pm
I found this on TechCrunch today.
If you saw this one coming, give yourself a very large prize. Design is experimenting with Digg style voting features on search results that allow users to vote up or bury search results they see.
This is actually a good idea, but I could find no record, either at TechCrunch, on Design’s own website, or at Marketing Pilgrim, which also ran a story on the topic, of how to sign up for this experiment.
I like Design Labs because you can test out new features that Design is experimenting with. One feature I really like is the Design Suggest feature, which provides keyword suggestions when you start typing keywords into the Design search box. That's a useful feature. The voting feature looks interesting, but it does have some potential problems.
One potential problem is spam. Spammers and blackhat Designs could game the system in the same way that they’ve gamed PageRank, which will totally ruin it for all of us. Another danger is that the voting could screw with some of Design’s own algorithms and either water them down or render them virtually ineffective. That could be why they’ve decided to make the results only affect your own personalized results. It is a requirement, by the way, that you be logged in to your account in order to use the feature. But I couldn’t find any way to use it even when I was signed in.
Another benefit to Design, and this could be the real reason behind the experiment, is this: If users vote up or down certain results on their searches and this experiment works the way it is supposed to work then Design will know more about each person’s preferences. That means more personalized results and better results for each user’s personalized preferences. Once Design nails down precisely what you are looking for when you type in “Rabbit” - the furry little creature or the German-made automobile - then they’ll be able to target their customers’ pay per click advertising to you better, which will increase the value of the clicks. It’s all food for thought.
Sign up for the Brick Marketing Blog Newsletter!
searchengineoptimizationjournal.com