Now you can customize your Google searches

IDG News Service — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 12:29:24 -0500

Google Inc. has launched a search feature that lets signed-in users re-rank, delete and add comments on search results, according to a Google blog posting Thursday.

The new feature, SearchWiki, is an example of how search is becoming "increasingly dynamic, giving people tools that make search even more useful," according to Google.

Users who do the same search frequently can remove a site from the results that isn't of interest, said Google spokesman Anthony House.

Users can also add comments to a site, which will pop up every time that site is in the results. If a user searches for car sites, the user can add a comment to the site to help remember that it has a lot of interesting information on, for example, hybrid cars, according to House.

Comments are always shared with other users and signed with a person's username. Re-ranked search results, however, are only seen by the signed-in user and do not affect other people's results.

Users can further personalize search results by typing in the URL of a site they want to add to their search results for a certain topic, or move a site to the top of the search results.

There is also an option to see how other people have customized a search, which is accessed by clicking "see all notes for this SearchWiki" at the bottom of the page.

For SearchWiki to work, the user must be signed in to a Google account and English must be the preferred language, according to House. Changes are stored in the user's Google account.

Users can keep track of all the changes they have made by clicking on "see all my SearchWiki notes." Users can also remove edits or comments and go back to the usual search results.