Was That Link Good For You?
Is this new?
I can’t say I’ve seen it before.
A “Was This Link Useful?” prompt, with Yes/No buttons, appeared when I clicked back from a search result. This is not on Adwords listings, this is on the main organic SERPs.
It is clearly a voting mechanism testing the relevance of search result listings. The voting buttons appear, Web 2.0-stylee, as an animated drop down under the link you clicked, once you visit the site and click the back button.
November 20th, 2006 at 5:45 am
[...] [...]
November 20th, 2006 at 6:41 am
Well suprising what did you search for?
November 20th, 2006 at 6:48 am
I haven’t seen that one. Another new feature I’m seeing is ‘Note This’ that encourages you to make a note on the SERP result with Google Notebook. That’s an intriguing application that doesn’t seem to have got much air time.
November 20th, 2006 at 8:40 am
About time, this will stop all that arbitrage, or it will certainly help. I bet if someone clicks the ‘no’ that will hurt there quality score to no end.
November 20th, 2006 at 11:57 am
[...] This would also account for some of the strange appearances with Google’s SERPs (screenshot of request is there). While the Google Adwords quality feedback system has been known about for some time (click on an AdWords link from Google SERPs, go back to the SERPs and you may see a ‘Was this link useful?’ request), this new system seems to solicit similar user feedback for organic listings. (Here’s an short but interesting side discussion about tainted feedback responses WebMasterWorld.com.) [...]
November 20th, 2006 at 4:40 pm
Mr Mean: This wasn’t on adwords, this was on the free serps.
Search term: Gin and Tonic Recipes
>>Note This
Interesting…I wonder how many people are using Google Notebook?
November 21st, 2006 at 3:25 am
Nice find.
One of the recent Microsoft patent applications mentioned the possibility of including feedback buttons next to listings in search results. The context of that patent application was as a means of spam reporting, which this could possibly be seen as, too. I’d imagine that there would be some IP logging going on with the feedback to try to make sure that people weren’t attempting to negatively affect competitor’s search results listings.
I installed notebook, but don’t find myself using it very much.
November 21st, 2006 at 6:07 pm
>>I’d imagine that there would be some IP logging going on with the feedback to try to make sure that people weren’t attempting to negatively affect competitor’s search results listings.
I think you’re right about that one, Bill.
It doesn’t appear on searches I have an association with, so perhaps there’s a search history, or site history, being considered.