Google to Give “Preferred” Sites Prominence in Results

The Mountain View, Calif. search giant is rolling out an interesting new search feature in beta that allows users to set a list of preferred sites, from which the search algorithm will give prominence to those sites when results are returned.

Google explains the feature as such:

The preferred sites feature lets you set your Google Web Search preferences so that your search results match your unique tastes and needs. Fill in the sites you rely on the most, and results from your preferred sites will show up more often when they’re relevant to your search query.

What this sounds like is that Google is interested in making its results more relevant to the specific user. While it’s not clear yet whether this may be the start of Google attempting to use these lists to create a “trusted sites” directory to further tune its standard results as some have suggested, this is useful for those of us who may be frustrated with the amount of junk that is sometimes returned in Google results.