Out now from Microsoft Research is U Rank, an experiment that allows people to move results around, as well as share them with friends and add comments to listings.

Want to play? Sigh. You have to register using a Windows Live ID. Why not just make it open for anyone to use on a cookie basis? The cookie could allow short term changes to be remembered, while logging in could be done for those who wanted to protect their edits in the long term.

Anyway, once in, you can do a search and wait, and wait, and wait to get back results. Perhaps the response time will improve. When they appear, you can then hover to the right to get options like this:

These allow you to:

• Move an item up or down (click on “move me,” then you drag to where you want)
• Copy an item to another search (this is weird, and I couldn’t get it to work. I assume it will move a listing to appear in the results of another search that you indicate)
• Add a note to any item (this also wouldn’t work for me, perhaps because I’m using Firefox).
• Delete a result

Edits that you do then are recorded and appear the next time you do a search. IE, move a result higher, and you’ll see it higher next time you search, along with a little flag indicating you did an edit.

By default, sharing of searches is on, as you’re told next to the search box:

This means any search you do is automatically shared with those you friend through the service. That’s a terrible idea, having it on by default. I think people will fail to remember to block sharing for some fairly personal searches they do. Far better to make sharing something you do explicitly, to be on the safe side. Of course, the downside to this is that people might not remember to do so, which takes away from the social experience Microsoft is aiming for with this test.

Is search really social? My Search 4.0: Putting Humans Back In Search from earlier this year argued that in many cases, I feel it is not. It also touches on the privacy issues raised with sharing:

Finally, privacy is an overlooked issue when it comes to social search. People often search for intensely private, personal things using search engines. Search engines are almost like confessionals, where people seek solutions to problems they might not tell real people that are close to them. With social search, do they have to remember to turn off a sharing feature that might be activated by default? And if it’s not on by default, will it get any take-up at all?

Of course, you start the service with no friends at all, so sharing isn’t that much a worry at the start. At the moment, once you join, others that seem to match you are somehow suggested (I had suggestions from people within Microsoft Research). You have to actually accept them, however. You can also invite two other friends, at the moment.

Friends are able to move results that influence what you see. In other words, if they do an edit, you’ll see that edit in your own results. Plus, you can make use of a tag cloud of searches to see what others are searching on.

Concerns on sharing aside, the project looks interesting. It also looks a lot like the Google Like/Don’t Like experiment that has been off and on since last year, as well as editing tools that Wikia Search rolled out and ones that I think Mahalo also has. Hakia also just recently rolled out a way for group edits in the form of “trusted results” using librarians and informational professionals to contribute.

In short, the wave of letting users edit their own results is back? Back? Yes, because if I had time, I’d add more about how we used to have many of these same tools with the major search engines years ago. But no matter — the ability to edit and move results is welcome, and I hope we’ll see more of it.

And will we see this on Microsoft Live Search? Says Microsoft in their email about it:

Live Search has absolutely no intention of implementing this…

Of course, I’m sure Live Search almost certainly WILL implement anything that they find useful on this experimental site. After all, the email goes on:

The goal of the research project is to learn more about “how” people use search technologies, like whether they take advantage of the ability to edit search results and how they share the results over time with friends and family.

So check it out. Just remember to turn that sharing off or be sure you really, really like the folks you friend on the system, if you use it much.

Yoople is a collaborative search engine that I discovered over the weekend. Very simple idea – run your search and Yoople grabs results from Yahoo and displays the first 10 for you on the screen. You can then click and drag a result and place it in a different position in the top 10 if you think the result should be higher or lower than Yahoo has placed it.

It’s a nice idea in theory, but when it comes down to the practicalities I’m less convinced. It would be lovely if we all lived in a world where everyone does things to benefit each other, but I suspect that in the majority of cases most people who move results around will be doing so in order to leverage their own site higher up the rankings. It’s an anonymous resource, so you have no idea who has moved something up or down, just that it has been (in fairness Yoople does tell you that a page has been moved X number of times).

They may be trying to overcome this problem by limiting the amount that you can move a page – I tried moving a page up one ’slot’ and that worked fine when I went back later to check, but moving a page up 9 slots from 10th to 1st place in the rankings didn’t seem to work, even though it said the page had been moved. A limitation like that would certainly make sense and would (albeit slightly) overcome my cynical criticism. Another disadvantage is that users are currently limited to just seeing 10 results for a search, which isn’t helpful.

Yoople is a nice idea in theory, of limited use in a practical sense, and interesting to view as a possible (but unlikely) way of getting more accurate rankings.

Postscript From Danny: I agree with Phil that this type of service can be open to spamming. However, one interesting barrier is that you have to be in the top results already in order to drag and drop yourself higher.

For example, in a search on “search engines,” Search Engine Land doesn’t appear in the top results at Yahoo (we’re working on it!). Those results power Yoople, so there’s no listing for me to drag and drop higher, if I wanted. A site trying to manipulate Yoople at least needs to have earned some basic rankings.

If you’re buried in Yahoo results, it’s even harder. Yoople provides no way to see 100 results at a time. You have to keep adding more by clicking on the little > symbol at the bottom of the page.

Also note that if you drag and drop a site, each drop counts as one action. For example, I tested moving a site up to the top of the list but kept dropping it in the wrong place accidentally. When I was done, it registered as having been moved as three times even through really, it was only me moving it once. Perhaps rather than number of movements being shown it should be number of people who have moved it.