In November 2008 Google announced the introduction of SearchWiki. Google allows its users to mark up Google search results. It is possible to add comments and change your Google ranking! You can also see the result comments from other people. In a way, people vote for the best result and help the Google algorithm to pick the best result with human votes. Nice principal, but do you use it?

Effectively few people use it and there are few rankings or comments about any website. It is maybe a good thing because one of the worst things is the website comments: everybody is writing stupid comments and nothing is controlled. See below some comments about the Yahoo.com website:

Yahoo Searchwiki notes

These comments are mostly spam or stupid comments without any interest. Not well planned.

After few months of existence, Google SearchWiki has not really improved the search but has polluted the search engine result page!

Rumour is that Google will drop this project (or at least part of it).

Wait and see…

New battle between the two online giants: the online coverage of the Indian election 2009.

Everything is ready to attract new users. And we can see that Google and Yahoo have definitely chosen the right country to fight over, with over 45 million  internet users in India. And the Indian internet market is growing pretty quickly. So what have the done for the Indian election 2009? Both of them have now made a micro site about this election:

Yahoo Site - Indian Election

http://in.elections.yahoo.com/ from Yahoo! and

Google Site - Indian Election

http://www.google.co.in/intl/en/landing/loksabha2009/ from Google.

My first impression is that Yahoo! has made a far better job of it than Google on this one. The design and structure of the information is very well done particularly in comparison with  Google’s attempt. Google has just created an iGoogle page for this election; not that user friendly!

We can also see that Yahoo!, unlike Google, is trying to make some money via advertising to finance this initiative. I imagine that this is because Yahoo has spent a lot more money on this project than Google and need to recoup their financial investment.

But the investment (time and money) is very little compared to the amount put in to the American election few months ago (obviously from an American company this is no big surprise).

It is hard to know who will be the big winner of this battle but one thing is sure Yahoo has come up with the best website, but the funny thing is on the first page of Yahoo result page,  for the keyword ‘Lok Sabha Elections 2009’ we cannot find the Yahoo site – a mistake not made by Google.com