On one hand I am the biggest Google fan one could hope to find. Yet on the other I almost hate them to the point I wish they would just go away. Obviously they're not going anywhere, and if they did it would probably bum met out pretty badly. I mean I use G everyday. One of my blogs, my main email, my tracking stats for any blogs I track, and now my documents are all stored on Google servers. While that is pretty awesome that they are kind enough to let me store so much crap on their networks, I sense there is a an ulterior motive.
Now they have a lot of my precious data, and a lot of other people house vast amounts of data on their servers. Sometimes I wonder if they are secretly monitoring and watching everything I do with them. For example, I often wonder if they maybe have some tracking code on their free toolbar that I always install. They could be tracking EVERYTHING I do in a browser! Not that I'm worried about what they may see. But it is a little unnerving.
The latest thing I noticed is there are some new buttons on SOME of my G search results pages (SERPS) Check them out:
You'll notice a little upturned arrow. This will move that result up (for your searches, not everyone's....yet). There's also an "X" to remove it from your results. There's also a comment button at the bottom-right of each listing, these comments are public. While it doesn't seem like much right now (to me at least). I have a feeling the data pack rats at G are storing all of the info they get and will eventually apply it to their algorithms. Thus hopefully improving the relevancy of their index.
Will this be the future of index management? Will users "vote" sites to the top spots for search terms? It should be interesting to see what develops in 2009.
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