One of the latest in new products/ services search engine juggernaut Google™ recently rolled out is a personalized search modification they call SearchWiki.

What is SearchWIKI? Basically SearchWIKI is a customizable search engine. It’s estimated that nearly 80% of internet users interact with a search engine before any other website every time they log on to the Internet.

End users of Google know what they’re looking for and we need a way to help THEM find it.

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Have you ever done a search for a moving company, say in Frederick Maryland? What the public is irritated with is the top ten results for a local business or service almost never display a local business or local service provider. Typically what Google returns as a search result is ten listings of moving company directories, NOT Frederick Maryland moving companies.

Why is that?

Simple, the online moving company directories are better SEO (search engine optimization) webmasters than the local web design guy who created the moving company website.

I don't know about you, but if I wanted to find a company to clean my widget, and all Google showed me was widget directories I'd be PO'ed too.
What happens is the better SEO webmaster is outranking the local guys and is offering the local yokels to pay up if they want to be on the first page.

I'd much rather search and go straight to a local company than click on a half dozen company directories, who wants to go through that many hoops? Isn't the point of the Internet to save time?

So how does searchWIKI change all that?

You don't like a search result? You can make it never show up on YOUR google search again. Really. SearchWIKI is customizable, you can personalize what comes up when you search. This amounts to your being able to "Vote" for the sites you want in Google!

How does this distort search results for those of us in the Search Engine Optimization business?

The other day I had the pleasant discovery that my main website ranked #1 in Google for the keyword phrase I coveted the most:

Local Google Advertising

I thought, "Damn, that's GREAT!" I started out wanting to be #1 in Frederick Maryland, it would be really nice to be #1 in Maryland... I was astounded to think I was #1 WORLDWIDE (out of 2,900,000 competing websites? I'm numero Uno?)

Now according to Google, the customizable results require that one be logged on to a Google account, say a gmail account. Supposedly if we log out of Google, we see what the world sees... allegedly

I have a bit of egg on my face now: