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Google is running an experiment with voting on search results to indicate which results you like or don’t like. Future searches will continue to show the results you vote for and hide results that you vote against. According to Google:

This experiment lets you influence your search experience by adding, moving, and removing search results. When you search for the same keywords again, you’ll continue to see those changes. If you later want to revert your changes, you can undo any modifications you’ve made.

In addition Google is also accepting recommendations for better results.

Presumably related searches would also be affected with results appearing or not based upon your voting and that user preferences would also be taken into account in determining whether similar results are displayed. While Google says that you must be signed in to see the changes, but I have to assume that the goal is for recommendations and voting to impact the display of results for searches by other people.

This feature is in Google Experimental Labs now and not being rolled out to the general public yet, but it sure makes sense as a means of customizing search results. In my personal experience, there are searches that I regularly make that I would like to eliminate certain results from and would welcome the chance to let Google know about useless results in a more clear manner than ping ponging from SERP to site and back again. Sure the system will be gamed, but that can be compensated for. And if they do nothing else with the tool, the results would be very useful to Google for validating their algorithm.

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