It appears that Google are moving in the direction of some of the social networking web sites, with two new features that it has recently introduced: SearchWiki and Preferred sites.

SearchWiki allows the user to raise a particular listing’s rank just by clicking on an arrow when they are signed into their Google account. According to the official Google blog, these changes only affect local searches. These changes will not affect other results.

The Preferred sites feature was not visible within my account. I assume it’s either too new of a feature or Google are only testing it on a select number of accounts. The new feature appears to be a method of letting Google know which web sites you “prefer” to receive information from. These results will in theory show up more often.

If these two new features become popular, is it possible that Google might start using some of this data when it comes to indexing or displaying results? If a lot of people perform the same search each day, and they all raise the position of the 11th listing, why would Google not factor that in?

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