Google Could Get Your Feedback on Search Results

Google are considering if they should look at user feedback into search results. As good as their algorithm is, you will always get irrelevant listings in the search results, and who better to know but a human end user.

I think if they can take this data into account, as part of the overall calculation there could be some value. I don’t believe in a purely consumer generated/contributed search engine. The key issue for me, would get a significant enough contribution from users to make it worthwhile data? If only say 0.5% of searchers actually bother to provide feedback, how would this affect the overall rankings? It couldn’t.

I believe strongly in the consumer generated world and know that this will continue to grow quite strongly, but all the numbers show that it is a still a very small percentage of users who actually contribute. Digg.com is a good example, you can still get on the home page with only a couple of thousands Diggs. When you consider this site gets over 22 million visitors per month, this is still an incredibly small number of people bothering to contribute. Most (like me, I have to admit) are just idle bystanders, enjoying the articles and comments.

Over time, this is likely to increase, I guess the question for Google is when will be it be worthwhile to trial something like this on a major scale.

MacWorld has a good summary and more links.