Back in November 08, Google released SearchWiki where you can customise your own search, by adding, deleting, re-rank or comment on search results. You can write notes to a particular site and these results will be shown every time you re-do the search. This is only available for signed in Google account users.

Long term, if Google is storing the data on people’s custom ranking, will it use this data to determine search listings? Microsoft also launched a similar beta project last year where people could post their ratings on a site.

So what does this mean for web masters?
In October Google launched their search engine optimisation starter guide and on page 22 which talks about opening dialogue with the commnuity that you service. This would take it to another level – so based on customer ratings your site could rank higher than those who haven’t engaged with their customers / community and haven’t got good ratings………Certainly food for thought for where the future of search could be going!