Crowdsourcing

Google Launches SearchWiki

Last night Google officially launched its SearchWiki function. Now you can customize your own search results—upgrading the best, deleting the worst and adding notes to any you like. It is, in characteristic Google fashion, straightforward and ridiculously easy to use. It is also—for a company that tends to follow the release early and often dictum by quietly adding upgrades and features with little fanfare—an uncharacteristic hard launch. Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb notes, "We expect this to be a very big deal. ... This isn't Google Labs, this isn't a little project off to the side, apparently there's a Google Search Wiki team and they have access to the primary search results page."

So what's wiki about it? While your changes only affect your own searches, you can also view everyone else's edits by clicking on the "See all notes for this SearchWiki" link at the bottom of any search page. This could become a real acid test for crowdsourcing. Since its release today, SearchWiki has already generated—shocking, this—much commentary in the search results for "Obama." This contains such gems as "Hi there!!!" and "Obamanation!" Google has written Digg style voting function into the comments, so we can hope that in time the more inane commentary gets voted out of view. But if I learned anything in the research for my book, it was that bigger crowds invariably lead to exponential increases in idiocy. SearchWiki could revolutionize search, or it could just attract a global army of trolls. Time will tell. While we wait, here are some first-blush reactions from across the Intertubes:

• Michael Arrington asks: If it ain't broke, why fix it?
• Official Google Blog on the release
• John Battelle wonders whether people want customized results.
• and VentureBeat says SearchWiki proves that despite its size Google retains the ability to reinvent itself.

Finally, here's the official Google video explainer:

A Prelude to a Post ... or, Is Google the World's Most Crowdsourcey Company?

This is just the stuff for a half-baked, Friday evening post when my traffic begins to dive into the weekend lull.

I'm going to admit this right now: There's one big, glaring omission in my book, and it's Google. While I devote a few pages here and there to the Mountain View Monolith, I hardly give it the attention it deserves. You'd think writing a book would provide enough space to do anything. In fact, it's an exercise in reduction. I wound up taking a chunk on Google Earth out entirely, and by the time Android was launched I was already in edits. But for the record, I believe a separate Crowdsourcing book could be written using Google as one single, fat case study.

And that's good. Because a writer's blog is sort of an ongoing appendix to his book. I want to lay out the areas in which Google is crowdsourcing. Ideally, I'll revisit each of the bullet points below in more depth in the coming weeks (Ed's Note: Emphasis in previous sentence mine. Jeff is too ...mercurial, let's say, in his posting habits to make promises of future content).

• Google Earth: See Sketch-Up

• GoogleMaps: See Google MapMaker

• PageRank: I write about this in Chapter 8. It's a tad controversial to cram this most elemental part of the Web under the Crowdsourcing banner, but in the end I decided it'd be erroneous not to include it.

• Android

• Google Answers

• Google Moderator

And I'm leaving lots of stuff out. I gotta go home and bathe my kids. I'll try to come back to this post over the weekend. In the meantime, let's consider this a group working paper. I know I have Googlers out there reading this! I'm issuing an open call to add to my list.