If you’ve ever thought, “Hey, I could give better search results than that,” here’s your chance: one of Google’s experiments is allowing users to vote sites up (or off) results pages.  They can also add completely new sites to the list.

Google Lets (Some) Users Adjust Search Results
Users’ work will, at this point, only be reflected when they’re logged into their own Google accounts – there’s no helping out (or messing it up for) the rest of us, in other words. 

The idea of expanding this closed experiment into the mainstream has created a lot of interesting possibilities, however.

If one person was able to affect everyone’s results, spammers would probably ruin Google within days.  Don’t think that the company doesn’t realize this, though, so users might instead have to achieve some sort of critical mass in order to change anything.

There’s also the chance that Google will simply use all of this input to update its algorithms; the experiment is really only a speedier and more direct reflection of what already happens.

The least exciting option is that the experiment will just remain a matter of each individual searcher fine-tuning his or her own results. 

Actually, the least exciting option is that the experiment will get canceled, but the individualized search route isn’t much better; given the existence of bookmarks and human memory, it seems like a lot of work going towards very little gain.

We’ll be sure to report any updates relating to this experiment (which was first spotted by Haochi Chen); it might become yet another abandoned idea, but could also represent a major change in the way Google works.