Google "Noted" appearing in serps

New? Or just new to me?

[Receptional]

I just did a Google search and saw a chance to "note" a result. Once clicked, a box popped up adding it yo my "notebook"

I didn't know I had a Google notebook! :)

Is this a scalable human interface do you think?

[Brett_Tabke]

[webmasterworld.com...]

Note book is a little over a year old. This is the first time I have heard of it proactively popping up without user intervention.

[Receptional]

Obviously not many people have seen it (or maybe they don't care) but I think it is potentially much more important than one might first perceive.

The results, as they came on my screen, offered the chance for me to "note" any result that I deemed interesting. I had not downloaded the software (although it did invite me to do so when I "noted" a site).

I think it is an important experiment by Google, becuase at SMX, Matt alluded to the possibility that in the future the algo might incorporate some form of human scaling. It's something I've asked Matt about before, ever since it appeared in a patent. Anyway - on the stage last week he spoke about it of his own accord - saying that the problem with "direct hit" style measurements (for those younger than me, it was a search engine where people voted for the best results) was that it was open to abuse, so any way of doing something similar had to be "Robust and Scalable". now - if you start using Google note, then presumably this is tied to a Google identity... making it just that - Robust and scalable human interaction with the algorithm.

[Marcia]

I remember back to when Yahoo Directory results were ordered by relevance and influenced by clickthroughs, word had it that the bots went rolling out regularly.

>>presumably this is tied to a Google identity...

So is Blogger, which is robust and has been very popular in the MSN SERPs.

[edited by: Marcia at 4:33 pm (utc) on June 15, 2007]