Google SearchWiki – What does it mean for brands?

Anyone logged into a Google account should now be able to see the new functionality that Google’s SearchWiki adds to the search results. Certainly the SearchWiki has generated a great deal of controversy in the SEO and web community at large.

We’ve been monitoring it since the beginning of November when we noticed Google bucket testing it, but it’s only been since last week, when it was officially launched, that it’s really been making waves. Anyone who doesn’t know what it is can read Dan’s explanation of Google’s SearchWiki here.

Google have stated that personal result manipulation won’t be used to determine the results for others – at least not in the short term – so the standard SEO rules will still apply for a while. What’s really causing problems is the amount of comment abuse that’s appearing – either in the form of spam, utterly inane conversations (a la Youtube), or blatently obscene and unmoderated abuse.

All comments left on the SearchWiki can be publicly viewed, which has implications for brands’ reputations. For a great example of negative commentary in action, read this post on ReadWriteWeb. The guy spamming the McDonalds comments also appears within the SearchWiki comments of several other world-leading brands. A further review of the McDonalds comments today would suggest that someone might have been trying to clean up the negative commentary, which apparently is possible by voting down negative comments.

How do you view these public comments? Here are a few simple steps to find them:

• Make sure you’re signed into a Google account
• Type a query into Google, and then scroll to the bottom of the page
• Click on the “See all notes for this SearchWiki link”
• Immediately underneath the URL of each website in the search results, there is a link that tells you how many comments have been left. Click on that

You have to admit that the usability of this functionality isn’t great – Search, scroll, click, scroll… A lack of moderation means the quality of the conversation deteriorating. Plenty of people are also reporting lots of of bugs – at the moment the general tone and quality of content reminds us of nothing so much as the comments on YouTube videos – rarely a space where useful conversations happen.

In the short term at least, it’s likely to be the early adopters, SEO industry, and spammers who get the most exposure to any public commentary, and not the general public. As with any social space, it’s important to monitor comments on the Google SearchWiki around your brand.

In the long term, it will be extremely interesting to see where SearchWiki goes. There are two areas we will be watching closely: first, how Google uses the information generated by users in its main results. We’ve seen Google use the quality and quantity of comments as a search ranking factor in other products (Youtube & Google Maps), so it will be interesting to see if they are willing to incorporate this within their organic results.

Second, we are interested in how, if at all, user behaviour will evolve around the use of theSearchWiki, especially the comment spaces. Although the commentary looks like YouTube now, it might turn into something more like Yahoo Answers! in the future, or something new altogether.

As with any major development of this kind, iCrossing will continue to keep an eye on this, and let you know of any updates.