New Google tools sift and sort search results

There's new information this week concerning Google SearchWiki, an experimental feature that allows users to annotate, rank, amend and rearrange search results, and to see how other people have modified theirs.

The feature is for the moment available to a relatively small subset of users, randomly selected, and could disappear as quickly as it turned up. (In fact, it bears some resemblance to a brief experiment in November 2007, in which users could give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to individual results, and to earlier tests that allowed for re-ordering, adding and removing lists from one's own results.)

The FAQ for the feature notes that the results remain as you've changed them; whenever you're logged into your Google account and run the same search again, you'll see the results as you've tweaked them. That's potentially handy for researchers who rely on search but have specific annotation needs, or who wish that the wonderful but obscure page they know about wasn't one they have to dig for, as one sometimes does with "regular" search returns.

Blogger Justin Hileman is among the Google users who found himself with access; in his testing, he noted that at least in the testing phase, everyone's edits are searchable. It's unclear whether that would be a feature should the current testing lead to a widely launched feature.

If, on the other hand, you're looking for something useful on more than only Google's turf -- or if you'd like to try something that's available to anyone, immediately -- take a look at SurfCanyon -- a plug-in for IE and Firefox that does, as the company puts it, "real-time personalization" of search results.

Semantic-Web search has been the Next Big Thing since about the time the word "big" was invented. SurfCanyon's approach is to sit "above" the Big 3 search sites (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Live Search) and, when a user executes a search, to quickly parse what the user appears to be seeking and deliver up additional nested results from pages further down in the search stack. SurfCanyon says that the program digs down for dozens of page -- much farther than most mortals will comb through returns. The plug-in can also sift through Craigslist.

The results are cleanly presented, and the recent addition of categories within results helps users to understand what the plug-in thinks you're seeking. Some of the searches we tried during testing delivered somewhat peculiar results -- an ego-surf moment handed back three of the wrong Angela Gunns, a mistake Google oddly enough never seems to make (though one might bet the other Angelas feel differently about that). Overall, though, results were intriguingly focused, and in a research situation SurfCanyon excels at winnowing the less-than-helpful.