Google's New Feature

I just noticed this new feature in Google search. I don't know if it's been there for quite sometimes, but since I use Google a lot, I don't think I miss it at the first go. Its name is SearchWiki.

Quote from Google:

Customize your search results with your rankings, deletions, and notes — plus, see how other people using Google have tailored their searches.

Please remember that your SearchWiki notes will be visible to other users, identified with your Google Account nickname.

For every search, each links is now given three new buttons, namely Promote, Remove, and Comment. At first, I assumed Promote would be used if you find a link useful and wanted other people to know it too, Remove for the exactly opposite reason, and Comment if you wanted to leave comment (d'oh) about the links.

When I tried clicking on Remove, the link is removed from the list. If you want to restore it, you can find it at the bottom of the page.

When I clicked on Promote, it brought the link to the first rank and subsequently another button appear in place of the cross Remove button. The tooltip still mentioned Remove, but if you clicked on it, it would just return the link to its previous normal rank.

This is a new way of Google to let user customize their search results. This is probably because the Information Retrieval technology used by Google (and every other search engines) will always produce non-perfect recall, precision, and ranking system. Hence, I think providing this kind of feature will help in mitigating the imperfectness of those measures.

The other good thing is the customization is shared among users so that users can also benefit from input from others. For example: I can see what other user think about a link in search result, and can feel more confidence in that link (as being recommended).

Notes: You can only see the new features if you log in to Google account

Updates:
Here's a video from Google's official blog about how to use SearchWiki: