By MICHAEL LIEDTKE
SAN FRANCISCO
If Google delivers useless search results, just erase them and you won't see them again.
That's possible under a new system Google Inc. unveiled Thursday. Hoping to give its search engine a more personal touch, Google now lets users reshuffle results so their favorite Web sites get top billing and disliked destinations get discarded the next time they enter the same request.
It marks the first time that the Internet's most popular search engine has allowed its audience to alter the order of search results.
Although the revisions won't affect Google's closely guarded formulas for ranking Web sites, the Mountain View-based company isn't ruling out eventually tapping into collective wisdom of the crowds to tweak its Internet-searching algorithms.
For now, Google simply wants to make specific sets of results more useful to each individual that comes to its search engine, said Marissa Mayer, who oversees the company's search products. Users will have to have a personal login to take advantage of the editing feature.
"It should make the search results more dynamic," she said.
The decision to let people tinker with their results is a tacit acknowledgment that not even Google's seemingly omniscient search engine can possibly divine which Web sites will appeal to specific users. It also underscores how frequently people use Google to search for the same thing, such as "San Francisco hotels," over and over again.
Google's search recipe relies so heavily on automated ingredients that a variety of startup rivals such as Mahalo, Hakia and ChaCha have tried to carve out a new niche by relying on humans to vet and point to results.
But none of those have made a dent in a market that is increasingly controlled by Google, which processes more than 60 percent of the search requests made around the world.
Here's how the new system, called SearchWiki, works. If you're logged into Google when doing a search, you'll get results with a series of buttons below the links. Clicking on arrow pointing upward moves a result higher on the results page. That link will come back in that new spot the next time you search on the same term. Clicking on an "X" will delete the link so it doesn't appear the next time you make the same search.
Users will also be able to open a box to make notes about different sites so they can be read again in the future. The comments also will be shared with others who are logged in, if they click on a link for "See all notes for this SearchWiki."
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D94IVTBO0.htm
【數位時代】Google推出SearchWiki 搜尋結果由你決定！
從現在開始，你可以自己決定Google的搜尋結果排序。Google日前推出新的搜尋系統SearchWiki，允許使用者自訂搜尋結果，並可觀看他人所加上的搜尋註解，這是搜尋引擎霸主Google第一次讓使用者改變搜尋結果排序，也是第一次在搜尋結果中引進Web 2.0社群概念。
Google的SearchWiki允許使用者自行調整搜尋結果，可將偏好的搜尋結果排至前面，或是刪除不符合需求的結果。另外，使用者也可為每個搜尋結果加上註解，或是參考其他人的註解。不過使用這些功能前，使用者必須先登入Google帳號並儲存修改，下次再輸入同樣的關鍵字時，SearchWiki就會按照使用者的喜好呈現搜尋結果。
SearchWiki加入了Web 2.0的社群概念，運用群體力量檢視搜尋結果。《華爾街日報》認為，SearchWiki將開啟Google個人化搜尋的先例，並吸引更多使用者登入Google這項服務，在既有的搜尋歷程上再做調整。Google搜尋產品副總經理Marissa Mayer表示，目前Google的自動化搜尋排序不會被SearchWiki所影響，但會觀察SearchWiki所發揮的效益，為將來Google搜尋結果向集體智慧靠攏留下伏筆。（撰文、編輯＝陳怡如）
http://www.bnext.com.tw/FocusDay_1380