Google's SearchWiki

Over at the Official Google Blog, there's an update about the newest bit of Google Gimmickry - 'SearchWiki'. In a nutshell, it lets you re-organise your search engine results pages, adding comments and removing unwanted results. At a first glance, it might seem like a pretty nifty bit of gadgetry. But on further inspection, it just seems like Google are trying to find ways to make people hang around results pages for longer, thus gaining more Adsense (Google's Ad Network) hits and making more profit for The Big G.

Now here at Sizzle we're by no means 'anti-Google'. We love them. Their search engine is the best by far, Gmail is incredible, and Google Maps is a life-saver. But gimmicks like SearchWiki just seem needless. What does it achieve that hasn't been done already, and better, by the bookmarks functionality built into every web browser since the dawn of man?

I'm finding it hard to imagine a person who is both clueless enough to have to search for their favourite website every time rather they want to visit it, technologically capable enough to operate SearchWiki, and uninformed enough to not know about bookmarks.

The functionality is made even more useless by the fact that any changes are only reflected to your account. Obviously, it would be a terrible idea to let people manually add and remove results from search engines, but it would be nice if the mass-flagging of a result as 'bad' caused Google to investigate it and remove spam. In addition, the only 'community-driven' aspect of SearchWiki, the commenting functionality, is rife for exploitation. What's to stop the team here at Sizzle from badmouthing our competitors, for example? Not that we'd ever do that, of course.

Being able to denote search results as 'favourites' and others as 'hidden' seems to be distracting surfers from the purpose of search engines - to provide the best results without user interference.

What would be a nice Google app, if anyone working there is reading this (they're not), would be an alternative to del.icio.us, except one powered by Google's awesome searching and categorisation, and which didn't rely on terribly-designed Firefox plugins and with a pleasing, Googley minimalist interface. That'd be lovely.

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