08 April 2009 | Author: M. Thomson SEO & Affiliate Consultant

Will Google use the "vote links" microformat for personalised search?

In November 2008, Google launched a customisable search function that allowed users to remove, re-order or add better search results, dubbed SearchWiki. When users are signed into a Google account, search results appear with two 'promote' and 'remove' buttons. If a user clicks on the 'remove' button, the search result will be taken away, whereas the 'promote' button elevates the result by moving it to the top of the page.

Ever since its launch, Google has kept SearchWiki live, indicating that the search engine is either interested in the data or users are enjoying the increased functionality. Using this success, it's possible that Google may have further plans for this strand of personalised search.

Currently, SearchWiki is only available to users when within the Google search results page. Let's estimate that when making a search query, a user spends 10 per cent of their time looking at search results and the other 90 per cent of their time on the websites that they've found through Google. That's a huge proportion of the user's time that's inaccessible to Google - or is it?

About microformats

Step up microformats: microformats are small patterns of HTML that represent commonly published content on the web. Take the hCard as an example of a microformat; you add little bits of code to your contact details on your website to make a machine readable contacts card (vCard). If your browser permits, you can then automatically extract and use this data as you like - for instance, add it to your Outlook Contacts.

Vote Links

While many people find the hCard useful, it is the vote links microformat we're interested in here. The concept of vote links was developed by Kevin Marks and Tantek Çelik from Technorati, and it is used by the blog search engine to "vote-for", "vote-abstain" or "vote-against" blog posts. For example, if you like a specific blog post, you can vote "for", "against" or "abstain". Vote links are also used by websites to predict future trends or express opinions.

Will Google use the 'vote links' microformat for personalised search?

In order for Google to reach that 90 per cent of web users' time mentioned earlier, vote links could fill the gap. Users - most likely bloggers - could express their opinion of that website via vote links. The blogger could "vote-for", "vote-against" or "vote-abstain" and Google could take note of the human edited value in the same way they utilise SearchWiki votes at the moment.

This value could then be used in two ways:

Google automatically crawls and takes users' vote preferences into consideration, and alters everyone's search results.

Users could click on a vote link through a website, Google Chrome or the Google Toolbar plug-in on another browser. This vote could then be attributed to their personalised search account.

Here's an example:

Will Google use the 'vote links' microformat for personalised search?

The second option seems most likely but the first would open up a new way for influential internet users to express their feelings about particular websites. Such feelings could then be echoed in Google's search results, and the impact on the search and social media landscape could be significant. Not only would external links be a key attributing factor to Google's algorithm, a user's preferences would count too, signalling the advent of opinion-powered search results.

This prediction may seem far-fetched, but it's likely that Google, in its boundary-pushing wisdom, has considered this approach to improving their search results. Could a combination of personalised search and vote links be the solution? It's a premise that shouldn't be ruled out. What's more, the noise on the web about microformats is relatively low, offering Google the perfect testing ground to try them out.