Google has added a new feature to its Personalized Search but it went unannounced, even not blogged about by Matt Cutts on his blog… The only thing that indicates it, besides the fact that it’s out there, is this little addition in the Personalized Search help:
3. What are bookmarks?
Bookmarks are a set of links to your favorite websites. When you are browsing your Search History, just click the star next to one of the search results listed to create a bookmark for that website. Once you’ve starred a site, you can click the “Edit” link to add a label or notes for the site. You can then view the bookmarks for specific labels using the links on the left side of the page. The labels and notes you create for bookmarks are also searchable.
Of course everybody compared it right away to Yahoo’s tags – the only difference is that Yahoo’s tags are social, i.e. the tag gets bigger as more people use it for something. Of course everybody started wondering if and when those tags would be used for the general search algo. Some people (like Aaron Wall) have even started asking people to tag their site already 🙂 Nathan Weinberg of Blog News Channel suggests that
If Google in the future opens this up, letting users share their bookmarks and see bookmarking data in searches, we could see something very useful and popular.
– and spammable as well. Though maybe not very easily. As Aaron Walls notes,
It would take a good bit of knowledge to create a variety of random Google accounts that had regular and unique search habbits over time.
He also says,
I believe Google will eventually find ways to trust Google accounts more the same way they trust domains more as they age.
– so should we start aging Google accounts like we age domains? 😉
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