Blog homeI have written previously about how Virgin and Thomson both have “recently selected products” or “recently visited pages” integrated tightly with their holiday search engines on their websites. (see previous post)
This functionality is especially helpful when visitors make repeat visits (perhaps over a couple of weeks during the research phase for a travel product purchase) - as on subsequent visits the user’s experience can be improved by actions made by that user on previous visits.
Anyway, I have just come across an experiment that Google are currently running which achieves something similar. I can’t find the experiment in their labs - so it seems that this is a non-public public experiment. Their experiment focuses on letting users vote a result off a page - or to the top of a set of search results.
Quoting Google (thanks Google!)…….
This experiment lets you influence your search experience by adding, moving, and removing search results. When you search for the same keywords again, you’ll continue to see those changes. If you later want to revert your changes, you can undo any modifications you’ve made. Note that this is an experimental feature and may be available for only a few weeks.
How do I use it?
Like it?
This button (fig. 1b) will move the result to the top of the page and add this orange marker (fig. 1a) next to it so you can easily recognize it. The result(s) you promote will appear at the top whenever you search for the same keyword(s) in the future.Don’t like it?
This button (fig. 1b) will remove the result, and it will remain hidden when you search for the same keyword(s) in the future.Is it permanent?
Your changes will be applied each time you search for the same keyword(s). There’s a link at the bottom of the search results that lets you view the results in their original ordering.
This feels a bit like the voting buttons that were (still are) available via the Google Toolbar……
How could we apply this idea to a travel website?
On a flight or holiday search website, for example, you could vote off an individual result (or perhaps an entire destination) - and then - on this visit and on subsequent visits - come back to the travel website and see results you are interested in.
This will help the user (because they get more results they are interested in) and it could help the travel website as you can see more data on what people really like (and don’t like).
I don’t know of any ecommerce sites that let you do this at the moment? Anyone know of one?
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I like this kind of idea. There’s reports of Yahoo now integrating Delicious results in this fashion. I think what you’re seeing in Google now is Personal Google or something like that? Ie. you have to actually have set this to work? At least that’s how it used to be…. Personally my favourite add on is the Stumbleupon toolbar. That automatically places SU votes behind the Google search engine results and really helps sort the good results from the bad when you’re doing a search on Google. And it gives Google one less bit of control and data which in the current standing can only be a good thing. Don’t get me wrong, I love G, but it can also be your biggest enemy…. and giving it too much power for no reason could backfire in the long run.
I think Kelkoo have somting similar as part of their travel search. You can select and deselect elements of the holiday as you wish but the data is not stored.
I too have witnessed this Google experiment. You can only speculate on the degree of impact, if any that the voting system has on the algorithm. If it becomes commonplace, the impact on SEO agencies will be interesting.