I've been noodling around with customized search engines, for my "how to be a value-adding info pro" presentations, and tried out Google's SearchWiki. The idea is to help you customize the results of a Google search, and it's an interesting tool, although I'm not sure how useful it will be to info pros.
Short description:
If you're logged in to Google, you may have noticed some new icons at the end of each search result.
You click the up-arrow icon to move a particular search result up in the ranking, or remove a search result altogether. The effect is that, the next time you run the same search, you will see a customized result based on how you tweaked it the last time. You can even add a URL for a page you would like to have appear in the search results for a specific search, even if the page would not normally appear.
You can also add a comment to the web page; these comments will appear every time you retrieve that web page in any Google search. Note that your comments are public and associated with your Google log-in, so best not to add comments like "great take-over target" if you don't want the world to read it. Right now, there isn't a lot of, well, reasoned commentary in the comments:
{Note that a search for "Sarah Palin" did not retrieve any pages with comments, but a search for Sarah Palin (without the quote marks) turned up a number of comments. The only time you see comments if when you search with exactly the same terms as the person posting the comment.}
It's an interesting idea, but my experience has been that any tool that allows for random comments quickly becomes bogged down with garbage. If you frequently search on the same topic and want to ensure that certain pages always appear in the search results, this could be a useful tool. And the ability to add URLs to the search results could be handy.
The biggest drawback I can see is that info pros very seldom conduct the same search twice... and even if we do, we're often looking for a different aspect of the idea. I'm going to keep playing with it; if I see any knock-my-socks-off use, I'll write about it.
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