A blog post by Matt Cutts, where he reviews Google Co-Op, is the seed for today’s post on Google & Social Search. Google Co-op is a volunteer program where human editors contribute links to help display relevant search results to the searcher. The volunteers do this by tagging topics with keywords that tell Google when to display contributed links in response to search queries, queries that use one or more of the tagged keywords. These keyword tag files are currently in XML. You can learn more about them and see a sample in the Google Co-op Topics Developer Guide. Google Account users subscribe to different providers from the Directory page. As long as the user is logged into their Google Account, the next time they make a search query Google will:
- See what providers the user has subscribed to
- Scan them for links that have tags relevant to the user’s query
- Add those links to the top the search results displayed to the user
At the time I wrote this post there were 13 providers in the Google Co-op Directory.
A new feature recently rolled out is the refine your results feature. When you search Google, depending on the topic, you may see links at the top of the search results to other categories related to your search. If you are subscribed to one or more Google Co-op subscriptions, some of the links will come from that source if there are applicable topics. This feature can guide you to a sub-topic or related topic that satisfies your search.
Google’s almost stealthy way of rolling out new features is fascinating to me. Here’s a brand new feature that will have a major impact on how Google’s search results are affected by human editors, and I would wager 99.99% of Google searchers have no idea it exists; yet if they did they could choose to benefit from it today. The human editing and annotation side overlaps some of the purposes of an entity like Wikipedia; not on the content creation side but in how editorial opinion can affect Google’s search results. (If you don’t think Wikipedia is affecting Google’s search results, albeit indirectly, you haven’t really done any searching lately.) The “refine your results” feature, although not algorithm based clustering like that used by the Clusty search engine (and others), does provide similar functionality to the user. Finally, human edited directories like DMOZ (ODP) and others will be affected if Google Co-op links are weighted more heavily than the results from authority directories.
Here’s a giant Search 2.0 event that has managed not to draw huge attention from the web community (yet). The following is speculation, but in my opinion Google Co-op also sheds some light on the motivation behind Google’s new editorial opinion patent, which discusses the use of human edited query themes in conjunction with improving search results. Even more interesting is that they have made available a subscribed links API, which allows subscription content providers to add content programmatically to the Co-op.
Experienced search engine fans will quickly wonder how they intend to control spam in the Google Co-op; especially since they are providing an API. Here are some of the anti-spam related references I found in the Co-op online documentation:
“Contributors listed in the directory are people and organizations the community has found particularly useful and of high quality. The Co-op Directory does not include all Co-op contributors.“
“As with the style guidelines for Responses, if your results flagrantly violate the principle of triggering only on relevant queries, Google reserves the right to disable their display entirely, as per the Terms of Service.“
I anticipate that Google will need more aggressive anti-spam policies and mechanisms such as user flagging and probationary periods to prevent Co-op spam in the future.
Keywords: google, google co-op, matt cutts, google directory, dmoz, odp, search 2.0, search engines
Technorati Tags: google, google co-op, matt cutts, google directory, dmoz, odp, search 2.0, search engines