Google’s Searchwiki sounded like a good idea at the time. Sign in with your Google account, activate Searchwki, carry out a search and you can promote, or delete entries in your results list and add comments that can be made public. So I had a go. Unfortunately, should you later want to look at the un-searchwiki’ed results list you cannot just switch it off. You have to log out of your Google account and re-run the search. What annoys me even more, though, is that it overrides my Firefox Customise Google add-on.
I like to drop in an out of my Gmail, look at Google analytics about once a day and work on my Google Custom Search Engines. So most of the time I am signed in to one of my Google accounts. I do not want to have keep logging out just to carry out an ordinary search and to be able to look at the results in the way I want. Thankfully, Google seems to have seen sense over this. Techcrunch reports that Google will be providing a add a toggle button to allow users to turn the feature off, possibly in Q1 2009.
In the mean time if you are curious about Searchwiki, curb your curiousity. Don’t go there!
I know I’m not going to be the most netural regarding this issue, but.. really it takes a search giant a MONTH to add a option to turn something off? Really? And I have not seen much regarding privacy and this feature. (I must add MSE360 had this feature about 2 months ago, we turned it off because it simply was messy & users hated it)