Aplus.net Blog

The inevitable has finally happened: Search engine results can now be customized to suit your personal tastes. Last month, Google launched its new but highly anticipated SearchWiki function.

If, like most of us, you have a Google Account, and you’re logged into that account when you use Google’s search engine, your search results will now automatically reflect your known preferences.

How does Google know your preferences? By remembering your choices, and by letting you customize your results. With WikiSearch, you can “rank, remove, add, and comment on search results,” according to Google’s Web Search home page.

So, if you like a certain result, you can move it to the top of your list; if you don’t like another, you can remove it — and you won’t have to deal with it again in future searches. You can also add items to the list, or comment on results.

For casual consumers, the benefits are obvious — the process of finding what you like on the Internet is quicker and easier. However, the new feature isn’t beloved by all. Some bloggers are already trying to figure out how to disable it, and still others regard it as a dangerous threat to online business (as we reported here last month).

Of course, if this new innovation becomes standard and spreads to other search engines — a scenario that’s pretty easy to imagine — it’s true that we’ll see an upheaval of search engine marketing as we know it. However, given that search engine marketing is already a constantly-changing factor, effective online marketing today depends on the ability to continuously adjust to new systems, anyway. As always, it’s best to be among the first to adapt to the new system than to angrily lash out at Google for once again turning the industry on its head. In Internet business, after all, adaptability is the backbone of success.

We want to know what you think. Check out the Google WikiSearch function today, and come back and give us your feedback.