“Have you ever wanted to mark up Google search results?,” begins a new post at the Official Google Blog. “Maybe you’re an avid hiker and the trail map site you always go to is in the 4th or 5th position and you want to move it to the top. Or perhaps it’s not there at all and you’d like to add it.” The post is introducing SearchWiki, a new feature that lets you rejigger Google’s results by shuffling sites around and adding ones that aren’t there.
What it doesn’t ever do is explain the benefit of doing this tweaking. If you’re an avid hiker with a beloved trail map site, what are you doing searching for that site in the first place? Wouldn’t it make far more sense to simply bookmark it rather than game Google’s results? And why doesn’t SearchWiki do the one thing that would make the this search-massaging ability make sense–which is to let other people see your customized results? (If I were a hiker, I might be very interested in receiving results that have been edited by other savvy hikers.)