I’m in charge of our online marketing efforts here at Infusionsoft; I was a little stunned, shocked, and even a little scared to see Google’s latest move. I’m sure you will be, too.
Google is selectively rolling out an experiment where they will leverage user input to rank and sort results.
If you’re signed into Google and you perform a search, you’ll see that you can “vote” search rankings up 
or “vote” for the listing to be removed 
. As searcher, this is a great. It gives the searcher the power to decide what listings are good or not and, ultimately; search results should become more relevant.
Initially, it made me a little uneasy because my first thought was, “What if people click the ‘remove’ button on my listings?” As I thought about it, I realized this upcoming feature may actually improve the quality of our visitors from search.
You can read about Google’s experiment, but suspiciously this isn’t listed on their public beta testing site, Google Labs.
What if the results affected everyone’s listings? What if search became truly social?
You see, visitors who search a term and find us to be a valuable listing will “vote” us up. Therefore we’ll get more visitors that see us as valuable. But, those that don’t immediately “get” what we do, or don’t see our listing as valuable based on what they searched on will preemptively “vote us off the island.” In the end, we could have less visitors that arrive at our site from search terms that don’t make sense and more visitors that arrive from search terms that that are relevant.
This method also puts more pressure on marketers to ensure that websites are clear, concise, and powerful.
What do you think about Google latest move to make search results social?
