Google Asking Searchers To Submit Search Results

Sep 17, 2007 at 9:44am ET by Barry Schwartz

I reported at the Search Engine Roundtable that some searchers are noticing that Google is asking them to suggest search results that will “help improve search for everyone,” says the Google message.

The review URL submission, takes you to a login page, which then takes you to a form that looks like this:

Next time you do a search on that phrase, your suggested result will be shown with a red asterisk. Google also says:

If you click yes, we’ll save this suggestion with your Google Account so we can use it to improve your search results. This is an experimental feature and, based on this experiment, we may come up with other improvements in the future. Like all data in your Account, your suggestions are subject to our Privacy Policy. If you want to delete one of the suggestions from your account, just repeat your search and click “withdraw” next to the saved result.

After you submit the URL, it takes you to http://www.google.com/reviews/w/nominate, which is a 404 page for me. It does, however, appear that Google has many /review pages indexed.

So this feature seems like a way to nominate and review nominated search results in Google. Maybe a community like social search feature added on top of Google personalized search.

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.

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